Dear Valued Customer
Like many of our customers, we’re following the news surrounding the spread of COVID-19 which could result in your staff not being able to travel to a permanent place of work in the coming days, weeks, months. We have already seen Italy and Denmark on lockdown with many other countries likely to impose similar measures as confirmed reported cases rise in each region.
As a supplier of critical communications infrastructure to many businesses, we wanted to keep our customers and partners aware of what we’re doing to make our services as resilient as possible, and give you useful advice about your phone systems and to enable remote working – if you choose to do so.
What we’re doing to keep our services up and running
We’ve already taken steps to ensure that our products, services and support remain functional if – as a business – we need to change where our employees are physically located. We have business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place so you should not notice a difference to the performance of the products and services we provide. We will continue to support you as valued customers throughout any business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios that may be presented.
How we can help you prepare for remote working
If you’re already a user of our VoIP services, you’ll know that you can use them wherever you are, provided you have an internet connection and a compatible device, whether a handset, computer or mobile device.
So if you’re required to self-isolate or your business decides to enforce remote working please contact us to discuss any questions you may have surrounding this.
Areas of consideration should be:
• Continuity of telephony services
• Facilitating remote access for workers
• Audio and video conferencing capability
• Sufficient Internet bandwidth for remote access
Call Diverts
These are an easy way to ensure employees can take every call, typically involving diverting calls from an office phone to your mobile. So, if someone calls your office phone, they’ll be sent through to your mobile without it having to be done manually. Our engineers can help you with any requests for this so please contact us to discuss any questions you may have surrounding this.
Softphone app
Want to answer or call from your business number on any device without diverting? Lots of our customers use a softphone. We offer softphone support via browsers on desktop devices and apps on Android and iOS mobile devices. We can rapidly deploy a cloud based telephony system to allow employees to work from home on their PC’s or Laptops if this is required..
Openreach plans for home visits
As a supplier of Openreach broadband, we are complying with their rules regarding home and business visits. Openreach are introducing steps for their engineering teams should they need to visit customer premises.
If Openreach engineers need to make a visit, they will ask if anyone on the premises has been asked to self-isolate, how long they’ve been self-isolating for and if they’ve recently travelled to a high-risk area. If the answer is yes, the engineer will contact a hotline for advice on how to proceed and to ensure the job is scheduled for reappointment, when appropriate.
Additionally, they will ask if anyone on the premises has been experiencing any flu-like symptoms. If the answer is yes, the engineer will proceed with the job but will undertake additional hygiene precautions.
If the answer to both of these questions is no, the engineer will proceed as normal.
For further information or if you have any questions about our services then please contact us on: support@orbex.co.uk or +44 20 7870 3535