When it comes to uptime and being “on” and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 356 days a year (366 during leap years!), the top answering services take uptime very seriously.

In the world of technology, the goal for top-tier services is 99.99999+% up time, and the same goes for the premier services in the answering service world. We and a small handful of our answering service colleagues aim for that benchmark…and nothing less. When you are providing a service to people, anything less could indicate an underlying problem or issue.

Let’s face it….significant downtime can be embarrassing in front of your calls and downright damaging to your business overall. Phone calls can be the lifeline of your business. That’s why the best answering services have reliable and consistent systems in place that ensure calls are attended to properly, efficiently and immediately. Instead of ignoring these very real possibilities, answering services like ours pay a lot of attention to potential causes of downtime, and proactively anticipate them by having the most robust systems and resources – hardware, software, power, personnel – already in place.

An Answering Service that’s on top of things. At Answering Service Care, for example, we are quite aggressive when it comes to measuring these numbers and being on top of everything that makes up our infrastructure.

When you are looking at answering services and trying to determine which is the best choice for your business, it is important to know which questions to ask so that you know exactly how you are covered and what to expect in out-of-the-ordinary instances of downtime.

Here are some of those questions:

  • What kinds of redundancies do you have in place?
  • What kinds of backups do you have in place?
  • What is your disaster plan?
  • What happens when the power goes out, whether weather-related or otherwise?
  • Tell me more about your underlying infrastructure… is it dynamic and always adjusting to changing needs and demands?

No matter what your answering service needs are, it’s important to remember that the best ones anticipate and plan for all scenarios, even the most potentially uncomfortable or frustrating ones.