What is Emergency VOIP Cloud Services? (EVCS)

EVCS is a remote backup phone system for your business that can include instant, automatic failover. Acting as a hot standby PBX, it can mirror your primary phone system and take over if your on-site PBX fails or if your place of business is inaccessible. Without a remote backup phone system you may be out of business when disaster strikes – because you can’t communicate with clients, suppliers, or employees

Hot-standby PBX with automatic failover
PBX Parachute waits in the background until it is needed. When called upon, there is no hardware to boot, no software to run, and no data to move. As a hot standby PBX it is ready to go. Failover can be automatic and almost instantaneous, or you can bypass automatic failover and manage the transition on your own schedule. Calls can be routed to alternate phones in any location, such as cellular phones, phones in branch offices, or home phones.

How to use Emergency VOIP Cloud Services? (EVCS)

You can set up EVCS as backup phone system for use in telephone system disaster recovery and business continuation or as an emergency hotline for employees. Which way you set it up and what features you use are up to you, but we can help you get started. Just call us at 925-269-4005 or send an email to help@voip1communications.com.
When you’re ready to go, we’ll need to get some information from you so we can configure the system just the way you want it. This web page can help you understand how EVCS works, and what we’ll need from you to get started.

How does it works?
Basically, EVCS is a backup phone system that takes over from your primary PBX in the event of failure. Failures can come for any reason, from simple hardware breakdown to wide area disasters.
Failover to the EVCS backup phone system can be automatic and happen within minutes, or managed by your company.

For automatic failover, you must have Direct Termination Overflow (DTO) or a similar service from you phone carrier. With DTO, calls can be automatically re-routed to an alternate phone number (in this case the number for your EVCS) any time the carrier is unable to reach your primary equipment. US toll free numbers all include DTO and similar capabilities are offered by many local service providers. You can also elect to invoke EVCS manually, whenever you deem it necessary, by having your phone carrier re-route calls at your request.

Calls into EVCS can be routed to alternate phones of any type, in any location – such as cellular, home, branch office, VoIP or other phones. You can protect every extension in your company, or just the most critical functions, and each extension can have its own “follow-me” list of phone numbers, allowing calls to follow your employees to up to four different locations.

The process of call handling works like this:

• An incoming call to your main business number is re-directed to EVCS.
• Our equipment answers the call, typically playing an automated greeting that allows the caller to select a menu option to get to the person or department they want.
• We make an outbound phone call from our system to the alternate phone you specify for the extension selected by the caller.
• The extension owner (your employee) receives the call and decides to accept it. Once the call is accepted, we connect the caller to the employee.
• If the employee can’t be reached, or decides not to take a call, it is sent to voice mail. Voice messages can be retrieved by phone or web, or can be sent as a .WAV file to an email address - Unified Messaging feature.

What you need to know to set up EVCS. We’ll custom-configure EVCS for your specific needs. But telephone system disaster recovery means different things to different people, so we’ll need to know a few things about your specific application, such as:

• How many extensions in your company will be included in the backup phone system? We can include an extension for every employee or just your most critical functions.
• How many different sites do you want protected? Our clients with multiple offices, sites, or buildings often want them protected separately. Just let us know.
• Do you want an auto-attendant greeting, and what do you want it to say? We’ll do a custom recording for you that gives menu options to your callers or you can have calls routed directly to a receptionist or a group of receptionists. It’s your call.
• Do you want to set up any Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) queues and how do you want them to work? EVCS with full ACD capability, allowing efficient call handling to departments, rather than individuals. They can be set up with load balancing, skills-based routing, overflow queuing and more. If you’re not sure, just ask and we’ll help.

To learn more about Emergency VOIP Cloud Service, please call us at 925.269.4005.