Telephone System Maintenance: A wise Investment or an Avoidable Overhead?

 

These days, businesses have to find more and more ways to reduce their overheads in order to survive against tough competition. This means that regular spending needs to be constantly reviewed, to ensure that costs are kept to a minimum. Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to know whether certain expenses constitute money wisely spent, or money wasted. This is often the case when it comes to telephone system maintenance; because technical issues cannot be foreseen, businesses often wonder whether or not it’s worth taking the risk of doing without a maintenance contract, in order to eliminate another monthly expense. In this article, we will consider whether telephone system maintenance is a wise investment or an avoidable overhead.

Telephone system maintenance contracts involve a fixed regular cost, whether this paid monthly, quarterly or annually. It is, therefore, a business expense that needs to be budgeted for. The actual cost to each business will vary, depending on the terms of their contract. The terms typically depend on the size of a business, the equipment they need maintaining and the service level they opt for. Hence, a maintenance contract can cost anything between fifteen and several hundred pounds per month. In return for this cost, businesses receive ongoing technical support and emergency assistance in the event of a system failure.

The key to knowing whether the cost of a maintenance contract will be economical over the long term, lies in an assessment of potential revenue losses, should a major system failure occur. Although just thinking about doing such an exercise might give you a headache, it’s well worth spending the time on. After all, it could be a matter of profit or loss. Begin by imagining a scenario in which your telephone system went down. You are unable to make or receive any calls whatsoever. Consider how much money each of the following would cost your business:

• Wasted staff hours
• Loss of sales during downtime
• The cost of an emergency engineer call out
• The cost of repair or replacement
• The potential cost of reputational damage caused by customers not being able to contact your company

This will all be hypothetical, of course. The exact amount of money you may lose will depend on a number of factors including how long your systems are down for, whether the downtime occurs during a busy period and what the actual fault is, amongst other things. Even so, it’s easy to see how the costs, and subsequent knock-on costs (think reputational damage), could easily add up to hundreds or even thousands of pounds. This provides an argument in favour of making such an assessment an important part of your standard business risk assessment practices.

Of course, if telephone-related business does not constitute a significant part of your revenue, and you don’t provide the majority of your customer service over the phone, then you’re probably right in thinking that a telephone system maintenance contract is an avoidable overhead. But, this is not the case for the majority of businesses. Most companies depend on the reliability of their communications equipment. And, for a small regular price, a maintenance contract can provide protection against the negative consequences of a system failure. Those that take the time to do the risk assessment exercise, mentioned earlier, will also probably realise how much money they potentially stand to save by taking out a maintenance contract. This is because, for the relatively low cost, they could benefit from the following:

• Ongoing support services (up to 24/7 support, depending on the level of service opted for)
• Ongoing system maintenance – which helps to maintain system reliability and prevent major faults
• Same-day emergency engineer service at no additional cost
• Onsite support
• Remote support
• Regular system updates
• Parts and labour included

For any business that depends on the reliability of their telephone system, it’s clear to see that a telephone system maintenance contract is a wise investment. By taking the risk and trying to avoid the additional overhead, you could end up costing your business much, much more.

If you would like to find out more about telephone system maintenance, contact Midland Networks today on 0800 849 8585.