Business telecommunications and IT systems

It was estimated that last year’s harsh winter hit the UK economy for £6bn in lost business, staff absence and extra costs incurred in dealing with poor weather. Each hour a business is unable to operate can cost thousands of pounds in lost revenue, which in today’s tough trading environment can be the difference between make and break.

Have you got a good communications structure so that employees are quickly made aware that the premises are unreachable, avoiding unnecessary travel? And do you have measures in place for staff to be able to work from home, including the set up of secure VPN connections and provisions for making and receiving company phone calls?

The answer is to have a practical disaster recovery plan. This might seem like the domain of big business but technology is making it much easier even for sole traders to have cost-effective solutions that kick in if the business premises is unreachable, or untenable.

Businesses with du Pré’s hosted VoIP telephone system, du Pré Connect, can get staff to take their desk phone home and connect that into their broadband router, or for unforeseen circumstances have a ‘soft phone’ program installed on a laptop – it looks just like the phone on their desk and allows business calls to be received and made just as though they are in the office. The du Pré Connect system can also be set up with comprehensive methods of automatically redirecting calls and even monitoring activity so that out of eye doesn’t necessarily mean out of control.

For businesses without a VoIP system you can either have your business lines forwarded to a single mobile or you can change your welcome message to state that the office is closed. With some systems you may be able to get your maintainer to forward some key extensions to mobiles.

du Pré support

du Pré support is available over the festive period. If you require any help with changes to your voicemail or auto attendant messages during the festive period, please contact support on 08450 34 55 66 or by email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Please note all requests are dealt with on a first come first served basis.

du Pré Support opening hours are as follows:

Friday 23rd – Normal working hours
Monday 26th – Closed
Tuesday 27th – Closed
Wednesday 28th – Friday 30th  - 09:00 – 17:30
Monday 2nd January – Closed
Tuesday 3rd January – Normal working hours

And yes, just in case you are wondering, everyone here is geared up for remote working just in case Newbury’s streets turn to ice and slush.