This Winter is going to be Rough - Do you have your Communications Continuity Plan in Place?

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According to their website, The AccuWeather.com Long-Range Forecasting Team is predicting another brutally cold and snowy winter for a large part of the country, thanks in large part to La Niña... yet again.

La Niña, a phenomenon that occurs when sea surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific are below normal, is what made last year's winter so awful for the Midwest and Northeast. Monster blizzards virtually shut down the cities of New York and Chicago. Last winter was one of New York City's snowiest on record.

La Niñas often produce a volatile weather pattern for the Midwest and Northeast during winter due to the influence they have on the jet stream. The graphic above shows the position the jet stream typically takes over the U.S. during La Niña.


So, besides dealing with a lot of snow and ice, what does this mean for your business and how are you preparing for it?
Here are some valuable thoughts on what you should be doing for communications continuity planning.
1.Employees: Do you have a method to notify employees about snow days – when not to come to the office? It may sound mundane, but if you don’t, then the costs can be significant as soon as hourly employees start clocking in on days that the business is closed.
Suggestion: A written policy that is communicated to all employees about snow days that includes:
Will they be announced by an email or by a phone tree?
Who will be sending the email or making the calls?
When will this be determined?
How will at home employees be compensated?
What work activities are they expected to do from home?

2. Customers: How will you notify your customers that your business is closed?
Suggestion: A written policy communicated to your key sales staff
Will you announce via an email or phone tree?
Who will be sending the email or making the calls?
How will your automated attendant greeting be changed? By whom? Saying what? When?

3. Practice Beforehand! Don’t wait until your first snow day to practice implementing your plan. You should have a dry run
If you are using emails to communicate to your clients, make sure that the database is accurate. Make sure that the phone numbers for employees are accurate.
Make sure that you can change greetings.

4. Recommendations: Did you know that IP based systems and can enhance your ability to function on days when you can’t get to the office? S-NET Hosted Solutions can enable your work at home employees to log in remotely and work as if they were in the office. When combined with remote login capabilities on your network, your employees can work – answering calls, dealing with clients as if they were at their desks.

It looks like it is going to be another long, hard winter. We know what to expect – but the key is getting ready in advance. I remember the story about an out of work actor who finally got a one line part in a play. He had to say “Hark, I hear the cannons roar”. This actor practiced his line- on the subway, walking to the theater, in make up. Finally, he gets on stage, hears a loud BOOM- and yells “What the hell was that!?”. Moral of the story: Don’t wait until Mother Nature drops a foot of snow overnight. Make sure you have a plan that has been practiced and works!

5 Questions To Ask Yourself About Your Current Phone System

In today's competitive business environment, every sale is critical, every resource precious. And, every dollar spent has to drive bottom line results. That's why it's important for you to assess your current communication system. Here's five questions you should ask yourself:

1. How much do you know about callers before you pick up the phone?

We are all familiar with traditional caller ID, but now you can take it to another level.

S-NET Hosted PBX gives you instant access to your database before you answer the phone. If the caller is a prospect or customer, your sales team will have a full profile and contact history before they say, "Hello." Your team is better informed, and their calls are more effective.

2. How many phone numbers do customers need to reach you?

Making your customers hunt for the right number — and potentially be unable to reach you — slows transactions and reduces customer satisfaction.

With S-NET, one number — the office number — is all an employee needs to give out because your system knows where to forward each call. We call it "one number reachability" and your customers will love it.

3. Is setting up a conference call complicated and costly?

Conference calls have become a way of life for businesses. With IP Office, you no longer have to connect to a third party to hold your conference calls. You can start a conference call from your own phone at a moment’s notice. It’s fast, easy and free.

And for last-minute invitations, you can use SNET’s co-worker presence panel to check other colleagues’ availability to join the meeting.

4. Can your employees still conduct business while traveling?

When your staff is on the road, you can’t afford to let problems or order requests wait until the right person returns to the office.

With S-NET, your employees who work outside the office — whether full time or out due to an unforeseen situation — can access all of the same communications tools available in the office. From the home, a hotel room, an airplane terminal or almost anywhere, they can stay on top of their work so nothing slips through the cracks.

IP Office can also convert your voicemails into e-mails and send them so your team members get instant notification, retrieve all their messages and have the ability to reply ASAP.

5. Are you able to adjust to periodic fluctuations in call volume?

Whether you use a traditional call center or simply have people answer phones, managing call volume is important to customer satisfaction. Even if you’re busy, customers don’t want to hear busy signals.

S-NET Call Center Suite gives you the technology and tools you need to quickly adjust your call handling capability with fluctuations in call volume. By identifying peaks and valleys of your business calls, you can adjust your staffing and make better use of call recordings to minimize wait time and reduce caller frustration.

With S-NET Call Center Suite’s customer service applications for agents and supervisors, you’ll communicate more effectively with agents through wallboard displays — and you’ll get detailed data on calling patterns to help drive more effective sales campaigns and day-to-day selling performance.

Visit http://www.snetconnect.com to learn more today!

Collaboration & Teamwork: A Real Problem or Marketing Hype?

Collaboration is a hot, business buzzword today—very hot. It seems everyone is talking about better ways to speed team work and decision making.

But is this hype from consultants and companies selling solutions? Or is there real fire behind the smoke of all the collaboration talk.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest the latter. Yes, people have always “collaborated.” We have always had “teams.” These are not new ideas. What has changed is the environment in which collaboration and teamwork take place. And that makes all the difference. Here’s why:

Mobility: The workforce today is incredibly mobile. As much as 40 percent of U.S. workers now have jobs that could be done from outside the office at least part of the time. Not being face to face on a regular basis changes the nature of collaboration: visual cues, informal interactions—things which have always speeded collaboration and have always been take for granted—are now problematic.

Multitasking: Multitasking has always been a challenge as in the oft-quoted aspersion of someone not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. But again, the reality today is different: many people work on a task while monitoring a feed of information, participating in a conference call, responding to IM and e-mails, etc. Yes—at a certain point all of this multitasking becomes a joke and unproductive, but the reality is that some variation on the above is today’s reality. In fact some people might not even consider what was just described as “multitasking.” All of this has huge implications for how information gets presented, how we get someone’s attention, how decisions are arrived at, etc.—all key elements of collaboration.

Context: How we view and respond to something depends in large part on the context in which it is presented. A physical office is a context. A face-to-face collaboration over a conference table is a context. A detailed report—with an introduction, background, supporting points, a conclusion—is a context. But in a mobile, multitasking world dependent on e-mails, IMs, tweets and more, we find ourselves constantly moving quickly in and out of different situations in which we often have very little context. As the title of a humorous book once put it, “We are in the context of no context.”

Racing from place to place, juggling multiple tasks and starved for context—that’s a big part of today’s work environment. That’s why collaboration is not just a buzzword and why supporting effective workforce collaboration is a critical part of any business strategy today.

Upgrading your office communications: Is it worth it now?

Deciding whether and when to upgrade your communications is a challenge for every small and growing business. Today’s new communications solutions offer many advantages, but are they worth it? What’s the best way to make an intelligent judgment? Here are three options to help answer that question:

Survey employees: One strategy that many businesses use is to survey their employees. Employees are a great source of insight. Complaints that ring true in terms of impact on the business—lost productivity, poor customer service, and unnecessary costs—may give you all the information you need to build a case for an upgrade.

What If?: Another option is to play a bit of “What If?”: what would be the impact on your business if your communications gave you:

The ability to recognize your top customers and route their calls for priority attention
Enable your employees to give out one number—their work number—and get their mobile phone, office phone, home phone, etc. all working together
Get built-in call recording for analyzing customer service or simply catching everything said on a critical call
Eliminated the need for outside conferencing services
Many companies that upgrade their communications report that the impact is huge, but they really couldn’t “see it” when they were just getting by with an older system. Playing a bit of “what if” can help identify real benefits.

Calculate the Value: Perhaps the best way to determine if an upgrade is worth it is to take a cold, hard look at the finances. A new communications system can lower the costs of long distance, mobile phone plans, conferencing services and more. It can eliminate the need for technicians to visit your company for routine system administration and reduce the time that employees (such as front desk personnel) devote to answering the phones. It can help make your business greener, giving options for employees to work from home: cutting energy costs and possibly the cost of office space. These savings can add up to tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Hiring and Keeping Great Employees: The Mobility Factor

In recent years, the global economy has seen sustained levels of high unemployment. So that means it’s easier than ever to find and hold on to great employees, right? Wrong!

Finding and retaining the really effective employee remains a major challenge, particularly because today’s work force is so diverse. That’s why “one-size-fits-all” strategies for keeping good people simply don’t work any longer. And because turnover among valued employees is costly, disruptive, and negatively impacts customer satisfaction, it remains a major challenge. That’s why more and more companies are taking advantage of their communications systems to support teleworking options.

An insurance company of approximately 40 people headquartered in the Washington, DC metropolitan area did a comprehensive study on their telework program and found that 64% of employees said they would turn down a 20% salary increase to continue teleworking. In addition, 57% of teleworking employees reported improved job satisfaction/morale. For more information, see Unleashing the Hidden Productivity of Your Small Business by Chuck Wilsker, President & CEO, The Telework Coalition at: http://bit.ly/qiom1T.

Teleworking is not for every employee. But by implementing a teleworking plan, employers get more options for addressing the needs of employees they simply don’t want to give up:

The valued employee who wants to stay, but whose spouse or significant other needs to relocate.
The employee who needs a better work life balance—to be more available to children, an aging parent, etc.
Members of Generations X (born after 1961) and Y (born after 1981) who have grown up on technology and expect to make it part of their everyday lives.
With gasoline and public transportation costs rising, the five-day-a-week commute is becoming an expensive approach to workplace management. The Telework Coalition (TelCoa) estimates that a full-time teleworker receives an $8,400 indirect pay raise, regardless of his or her salary rate, due to the reduced expenses in gas consumption, wear and tear on the vehicle, insurance, parking, etc.

With two-earner households commonplace, there is a greater push to find ways to put personal and family obligations ahead of corporate needs—without making it an either or tradeoff. Teleworking provides that option and its one that more and more businesses are going to have to look at. http://bit.ly/k2scnJ

S-NET Recognized as Computerworld 2011 Honors Laureate

IDG’s Computerworld Honors Program today announces S-NET Communications as a 2011 Laureate. The annual award program honors visionary applications of information technology promoting positive social, economic and educational change.
“The number and quality of nominations this year were very inspiring and demonstrate how valuable IT is to community change,” said John Amato, Publisher, Computerworld. “Computerworld is very proud to name the 2011 class of Laureates and showcase their initiatives benefiting society through innovative uses of IT.”
According to Alex Fayn, President of S-NET Communications, “The significance of being selected as a Laureate in the Computerworld Honors Program for our organization is tremendous. It represents peer recognition of the efforts we have made in the development of our product family and the contribution it can make to this country!”.
S-NET Communications has deployed the S-NET Q Box powered by ViBE to guarantee voice quality and reliability on its Silver Networks Hosted Virtual Pbx platform. It allows businesses to use less expensive bandwidth to carry their voice traffic. A simple low cost ADSL line (under $20 in most markets) can handle up to 28 simultaneous calls with guaranteed business grade quality of service and failover. This allows business locations that were previously either under-served or un-economical to service due to poor infrastructure, the ability to have reliable and economical connectivity. Bridging the digital divide remains one of the crucial factors in economic recovery and the deployment of the S-NET Q Box powered by ViBE along with S-NET Communication’s Silver Networks cloud communications services is a significant leap forward in reaching this goal.
The Computerworld Honors awards will be presented at the Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony & Gala Awards on June 20, 2011 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.
About Computerworld Honors Program
Founded by International Data Group (IDG) in 1988, The Computerworld Honors Program is governed by the not-for-profit Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation. Computerworld Honors is the longest running global program to honor individuals and organizations that use information technology to promote positive social, economic and educational change. Additional information about the program and a Global Archive of past Laureate case studies and oral histories of Leadership Award recipients can be found at the Computerworld Honors website (http://events.computerworld.com/Honors2011).
Founded in 2004, S-NET Communications is a Chicago based cloud communications provider of hosted IP Telephony Services. S-NET provides managed voice over IP services to businesses and organizations throughout the United States from its redundant data centers. These products include a robust hosted call center, virtual PBX and MPLS through dedicated circuits. Through S-NET Communications Silver Networks portal, this same robust set of products is delivered via their clients own connectivity- in a completely bandwidth neutral environment- whether cable, sDSL, aDSL or other carrier’s circuits.
About Computerworld
Computerworld is the leading source of technology news and information for IT influencers worldwide, providing peer perspective, IT leadership and business results. Computerworld’s award-winning Web site (http://www.computerworld.com),bi-weekly publication, focused conference series and custom research forms the hub of the world’s largest (40+ edition) global IT media network. In the past five years alone, Computerworld has won more than 100 awards, including Magazine of the Year by American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) awards in 2010, the 2009 Best Blog from the Neal awards, and 2006 Best Overall Web Publication from ASBPE. Computerworld leads the industry with an online audience of over 3.5 million unique, monthly visitors (comScore Media Metrix, August 2010). Computerworld is published by IDG Enterprise, a subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading media, events, and research company. Company information is available at www.idgenterprise.com.

I want my ____ at work!

I want my ____ at work!
Fill in the blank with my: iPad, my Android phone, or my Galaxy Tab…
Every morning, when my kids lived here, I would call them downstairs for breakfast. My youngest (a.k.a. Mr. Charming) would try his luck daily. “But, Dad, I NEED COCOA PUFFS”. “No, son”, the prematurely curmudgeon (a.k.a me), “you need breakfast”. It seems like the same thing is happening today in the workplace. Everyone – and based on the lines outside the Apple stores recently, that can’t be much of an exaggeration- wants to bring their iPad (or iPad2) to work, use their iPhone or Droid instead of the company issued phones, not to mention a Mac. The Motorola Xoom is a hybrid that maybe even defies categorization – and I am sure that if you own one, you want to bring it to work. This creates a number of headaches. I would strongly suggest you consider the following issues:
1. Data security- when an employee can access data from your company, is that data going to be secure on his device? Can someone else breach his security on that device and access your data?
2. Are you paying for needless surfing? With the new AT&T pricing plan for Internet access, using the iPhone or Droid can cost you a premium if you exceed the total amount of data usage on your plan. If your employee wants to use a smart phone and you are paying for the mobile plans, make sure your plan matches the increased usage that comes with a smart phone – before you agree!
3. Is that Droid safe? Can it compromise your network? There have been malware cases reported by users whose smart phones use the Droid operating system. If you let the phone on your office network- is your network secure?
4. Are the new toys/devices going to increase productivity or increase distraction? Last year the mantra was reducing costs. Now, the new mantra is improving productivity.
5. If one of your top people- C level – brings their device to work, are you going to have the infrastructure in place to meet their expectations? Do you have enough wireless access points? Enough bandwidth?
6. Continuation of above. If one of your top people brings their device to work, are you (and your staff) going to have to contort your systems to enable the device(s) to work on it and meet their expectations? Case in point- if they get a smart phone, does your voice messaging client work with their device? Are there apps for that device that require additional (unplanned) expense?
7. Are the devices that are coming to work going to be (today’s) influencers in your upcoming (tomorrow’s) IT decisions? If “John” in sales brings his iPad and the VP of marketing decides that everyone needs one, will your budget get blindsided?
8. If you are using SaaS applications – do you have enough licenses?
9. Is your staff going to have to support devices that they are unfamiliar with- and be made to look “less than”?
I don’t have answers for you – but I think that there is no “one size fits all” solution. However, you should consider these nine issues before the barrage of devices hits you!