Government and Higher Ed

Both Government and higher education have the responsibility to be responsive to thousands of stakeholders for what can be critical communications. It can be a matter of health and safety that citizens and students do not find communications are unavailable. Up to now the resources to do this for inbound phone calls have been so great that few institutions even tried. But Telerestore a managed service, by sharing the cost of a “always-on” backup system has made it possible.

Up to now government and higher education have tried to fulfill this mission via outbound messaging. While useful this alone does not help in an outage or critical incident. Many outbound systems are opt-in and can only reach those that signed-up for the service. Also, in a outage, communication usually increases, making it even more important to handle inbound calls

Telerestore is a service that can really help public institutions maintain communications in any type of outage situation. Specifically, in an outage Telerestore helps bring the calls to the individual that they are intended for. This is recognized as important principle by auditors for state and federal chartered institutions. The certification groups have communicated clearly that institutions must maintain communications, not just notification. By managing and maintaining calls Telerestore makes it seamless to the caller, and easy for the individual at the institution to get their information. It should be noted that forwarding calls and the lack of backup communications does not satisfy most requirements, and two way communications is specifically given as a goal in an outage or emergency.

Advantages

The biggest specific advantage for healthcare organizations is that the calls are routed directly to the person they are intended for.   Whether the people  are in place and receiving the calls on cell phones or VOIP phines, or they are now at home or another facility, every call can be intelligently route to the correct individual. 

The EmergiCAST functionality can be used as a staff manager.  Using the ConferenceME and polling functions, employees can be asked to respond to touch tone responses as to their availability,  then either conference in to a joint call or indicated as available or not.     The Conference bridge capabilities are ment to be used daily and during and outage.  They should be used to make employees comfortable with the tools.  As a powerful bridge with ConferenceME capabilities, this function is a powerful  tool to let groups collaborate even if regular communications are unavailable.

Telerestore takes advantage of the investments you have already made in power protection,  and other capabilities, and is the only kind of solution that protects calls  in an outage (where everyone is basically in-place)  or an emergency---where key people need to leave the building.  Because Telerestore is so flexible and easily managed it is realistic for planners to believe they can adapt in any outage situation

The Toll-free hotline can be used to announce to people updates on the out age or emergency.  This can be updates frequently and is a tool to handle the increased communication typically created by any event.  Also a alternative mailbox can be set up for each employee.  So everycall can be routed to a unique mailbox---and sent to the correct individual  via email (over 80% of phone outages leave broadband internet capabilities untouched).

PRI in the SKY---With this option,  even if trunk lines or main power is cut a full PRI of lines can be redeployed over a satellite or other alternative connection THROUGH YOUR OWN PHONESWITCH. This protects you and keeps you operating even if public networks are down.