News February 2010
I don’t know about you, but if I arrived at the office on a Monday morning to find that all the office phone lines and broadband lines were out of action I would have been furious and seriously concerned about how we could continue day-to-day operations having been cut off from the rest of the business world. Well, for the 260 Northamptonshire companies on the Moulton Park Industrial Estate this scenario became a grim reality to them when 350m of underground cabling was stolen on 1st February 2010.
Firstly, very few businesses (probably none at all) these days can operate without phone lines or broadband and secondly, both means of communication are critical for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones particularly if you are in the technology sector. As a technology company, potential customers will expect you to have highly efficient technology when it comes to communication lines too.
Our offices are based in a rural location where unfortunately broadband speeds are very slow. We are fortunate to have a micro-wave broadband alternative service which is on an independent circuit to our phone lines. If we lost our phone lines we would still be able to access the web and make calls via Skype, continuing to function effectively using alternative means. Despite being unable to receive inbound calls on our office phone lines, the telephone answering service that we use would have taken all our customers calls and messages. This offsite service that we use ensures that all our clients speak to a real person rather than an answer machine.
Surely, this latest incident will force companies to think carefully about how they would manage their sales and marketing if they were faced with this situation. We all know that first impressions are so important when attracting new customers and generating new leads, and as the old saying goes “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. Nowhere is this more important than in a business situation. The latest chaos at Moulton Park must have cost companies dearly that first week in February. This has hopefully been a huge wake up call for other business parks located all over the UK. Unfortunately for those companies on Moulton Park they have already experienced the chaos and disruption.
To read the story from the BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/northamptonshire/8499561.stm
