Keeping your business afloat
Posted 26 July 2007 at 11:04AM by Emma Lowry in Email and communications
For many years I lived in Worcester, a city renowned for flooding regularly and where the site of swans swimming on the cricket pitch and the odd car floating around the racecourse were not unusual. Mildly amusing maybe (not for the car owner mind!) but struggling to get to work, getting cut off and watching the water creep nearer your home helps me understand some of the issues businesses face - so since it looks like we could yet see more rain, here's a few hints and tips to help keep your business going.
Keep an up to date contingency plan - take the time to think about key tasks that need to be completed in the event of a disaster such as flooding and prioritise each one. Having a plan in place will enable you to concentrate on executing it rather than having to make one up in stressful circumstances - decisions made with a clear head are more likely to be effective.
Keep in touch with your colleagues - It's very rare we get advanced notice of disasters, so use shared calendars on your email service to check where your colleagues are and quickly assess who is ready to start helping out straight away. You could use instant messaging to discuss where you are on your plan, is it working or a group brainstorm on dealing with unforeseen problems.
Keep important documents safe, and accessible - it's no good locking up your insurance documents and contingency plan in a fireproof/waterproof box if you can't get to them. Save important information such as insurance claim details, contingency plans, colleagues/customers and key employees contact details on a secure web accessible service like BT Workspace - and give access to several users just in case you're the one who's stranded.
Keep your customers informed - If your customers don't know what's going on and get let down they aren't going to stick around so communicating with them is key. A premium business email hosting solution will include facilities such out of office assistant, a simple way of sending out an automatic message in response to an incoming email - use it to advise customers that there is a problem and when you are likely to get in touch. If you have a web site then use this as a tool to communicate to your customers by posting a message on the your home page.
Keep business relationships going - Be as proactive as possible and send updates to your customers & suppliers on progress. Save vital time by setting up distribution lists so a single email can be sent to all your stakeholders at once, or you may set up different lists for suppliers & customers to use more appropriate messaging.
It's never going to be easy to get through an event that stops your business dead in it's track, but if you've got a plan and know how to make your everyday business tools work for you then it's going to give you a head start to getting on your feet again - even if they are a little soggy.
Tags: bt workspace, business email, hosted email, web hosting, website hosting, workspace
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