Some things never change — your customers need your business to be available 24/7, so you must know how to handle emergency calls.

If you operate a business, you understand customer service’s importance. You want your customers to feel like they always matter and that you are there for them every step of the way.

However, no matter how good your company is, there are bound to be those situations when calls flood in – it’s just the nature of doing business.

And what’s most important is how you handle those situations, especially in an emergency. When too many calls go straight to voicemail, your customers will lose your trust. This can create a snowball effect and hurt your business in the long term.

At Call Experts, we ensure every call to your business is answered, even during an emergency. Please keep reading to get our four tips to learn how to manage emergency calls.

4 Tips on How to Handle Emergency Calls

Planning for everything your business needs during an emergency can be challenging as a business owner. You may feel like you have to do your crisis management in the heat of the moment, which can put you at a disadvantage and increase your vulnerability.

At Call Experts, we’ve spent 40 years supporting emergency calls for businesses. As a result, we know the ins and outs of what to do in an emergency, and we’d like to share our knowledge with you. That way, you’ll be prepared for anything that might happen.

Be Prepared; Business Continuity Matters

When the power goes out or a global pandemic hits, your phone system is no longer operating, and you cannot reach customers. Before this happens, it’s critical to build a plan to let you continue serving customers while your power is out and until you can fix the problem.

Call Experts is a business continuity provider—we’re here to help you keep your business operating when it’s most crucial.

A significant outage can bring your business to a halt—and if you’re unprepared, it could also damage your company’s reputation. So take the time to develop an emergency and disaster response plan before any incident.

Your plan should take into account these essential components:

How your employees can communicate with each other in an outage (cell phones, walkie-talkies, etc.).

The importance of having all contact information and other essential business data backed up regularly (you can’t afford for phone numbers, email addresses, etc., to be unavailable).

And steps for communicating with customers about outages and delays (the last thing you want is for them to feel ignored).

It’s not always easy to prepare your business for an emergency, but when it comes to how to handle emergency calls, it’s essential.

Stop Using Call Forwarding On Your Cell and Start Routing On-Call

Call forwarding is a simple feature—the ultimate convenience for those who want to ensure they never miss an important call. But it doesn’t work well when on-call technicians try to reach you in the middle of the night or during an emergency. Long story short, when you’re on-call, you need a different kind of routing.

The correct on-call routing can take a lot of pressure off your cell phone and team while ensuring that calls get through to the correct on-call technician at the right time. Proper routing can save your customers and business money, especially during emergencies.

How do we know?

Call Experts has been around for 40 years, helping businesses with on-call. We’ve talked with countless companies about their experiences with on-call routing and why it matters—good or bad.

We’ve learned that most businesses miss about 22% of the calls they receive.

That’s huge! We know that with the correct routing, these lost calls could have been routed directly to the on-call technicians’ phones, even during emergencies.

When your company is on-call during an emergency, the right people must get the right calls at the right time. And with Call Experts, we can help you do this and more!

Emergency Dispatching for Immediate Customer Support

If you’re a business, your phone is your lifeline.

You rely on it for customer service and answering questions about products and services. And the last thing you want is to miss a call because you need more staff or the proper equipment to handle an influx of calls. Especially if these calls are pouring in during an emergency.

Ever wonder why your business needs an emergency dispatching system for your phone lines and how it will benefit you. Want faster response times? Do you want better routing of your calls? Want to see statistics about what is happening with your calls?

Your business misses an opportunity every time your phone rings during an emergency and you’re not available.

When you partner with Call Experts, emergency dispatching is easy, and every call is routed correctly.

We have a team of professionals trained to handle all types of calls, and they will be able to answer questions, solve problems and even transfer calls if the situation is serious enough.

Update Your On-Call Schedules Anywhere, Anytime

On-call schedules are the cornerstone of how customer service teams communicate with their off-site employees. They let everyone know when people are expected to be available for support calls.

Maintaining an up-to-date on-call schedule is vital for customer service, but it can be a hassle to update and manage the plan when you’re on the go.

While some call centers still use Excel spreadsheets or paper schedules, Call Experts lets you edit your on-call schedule from any device with internet access.

You can also see the schedule of all your agents, even if they work at other locations. And if your scheduling needs a change at the last minute, we’ll work with you to ensure the team can support customers whenever they need us.

Final Thoughts on How To Handle Emergency Calls

The best thing you can do when answering “how to handle emergency calls” is to have a plan in place.

With a surge of calls during an emergency—whether a flood, fire, or something else—a plan is essential to keeping everyone calm and working together.

Showing your customers that you have planned on how to support them through anything matters for your bottom line. A massive 65% of sales will come from existing customers, and only 20% of your current customers will be the source of 80% of your company’s profits.

A partner like Call Experts can support your business and customers through emergencies.

Get the peace of mind you deserve; you don’t have to be concerned about how your business will handle calls in an emergency. Countless companies have relied on us to help them through emergencies, and we look forward to being with you every step of the way.