Focus Answering Service recently made the transition to become a 100% cloud-based answering service, simultaneously boosting our crew’s efficiency and allowing us to focus on mission critical, client-facing needs.
Here’s how moving to the cloud helped our team – and our customers:
- It forced us to embrace the future: Focus’ premise-based servers were beginning to show their age. Replacing them would not only have been costly but would have also been a band-aid that did nothing to prevent us from becoming obsolete five years down the road. After extensive investigation, and thorough collaboration with our networking vendors and our contact center software provider StarTel, our management team made the decision to move our servers to the cloud.
- It reduced downtime (BIG time): Moving to the cloud increases a company’s reliability-factor tenfold. If you think about it, premise-based (on-site) systems require backups and upgrades to be completed manually. It’s a colossal drain on time and resources. As a cloud-based answering service, we no longer have to perform reinstalls. Backups are scheduled automatically. We can effectively copy our real-time databases over to different locations, so that in the unlikely event of an outage, we can simply reappoint our IP address, and log into the cloud-based system. Gone are the days when precious hours would be spent on menial tasks like technical upgrades. Instead, those upgrades can be completed in the background as we focus on our clients, and then applied to all offices simultaneously.
- It freed up resources: The move to the cloud opens up our administrative team to focus entirely on client-based issues, instead of being bogged down by IT and infrastructure concerns and crises. Management and agents are freed to “let go” of any IT and infrastructure needs and attend to their primary job responsibilities. And that is a great thing for our customers.
Becoming a cloud-based answering service also allowed Focus to keep our vendor options open. Unlike going the hosted route (which many companies do), we are not held into a contract or locked into any one vendor. In conjunction, Focus hired a company to handle all of our IT needs and play defense for all of our agents’ computers. Now we don’t have to deal with the technical issues and take time away from the operations management. That’s a big help to us and a big plus for our clients.
Over the last three decades, Focus Answering Service has been happy to disprove business owners’ notions that “No one answers for our industry well.” When hired, our team becomes part of your business – a collaborative partner who delivers a stellar first impression for your customers. And as a cloud-based answering service, we’re delivering results faster than ever before. Contact us today to learn more.