How Zoom Phone helps you achieve business continuity: 99.999% SLA and Local Survivability

Sometimes a minute lasts forever. Other times it’s gone before you know it. It just depends on what you’re doing during that particular minute. When that minute affects your employees, your customers, and your bottom line, you’re going to be counting on every second. That’s why Zoom Phone maintains a reliability of 99.999%, often referred to as “five-nines availability.” We maintain an incredibly high standard of service for uptime, so you can make the most of your own work time. Reliability does mean measuring uptime, but it doesn’t stop there.

Customers’ standards and expectations have changed dramatically in the last twenty years. While they’ve moved into other communication channels, reliable telephony still has a critical impact on the customer and employee experience and is a core communication method. Still, companies need to meet people where they are, whether that’s phone calls, online chat, face-to-face video meetings, or SMS texting. Zoom Phone even integrates with contact centers so that companies can communicate with customers on their preferred channels. 

But customer expectations aren’t the only ones who’ve changed. So have yours and the people you work with. You’re not always within arms’ reach of a desk phone or you may need to work asynchronously with colleagues and important customers. There’s a difference between phone providers that give you the tools you need in a ready-made platform and those that simply add similar capabilities to their legacy services.

Every minute of downtime can lead to poor customer service, damage to your brand reputation, or worse, customer churn. And if the systems that support your business go down even 1% of the time, you’d be without them for almost three full days each year. Here are some considerations when choosing between phone services: 

• Always-on services: It’s easy to pick up a phone and call someone, and it should be just as easy to video call or chat and move seamlessly between each communication method. Reliability is the cornerstone of making this technology work. For most companies, that’s backed up through Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Most providers for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offer SLAs between 99.99% and 99.999%, but those only apply to their own infrastructure. In addition to our 99.999% uptime SLA, we’ve explored additional ways to provide more reliability and remote survivability. For example, if a disaster strikes or an outage occurs, there are product-specific innovations that can help.

Solutions like Zoom Node with Zoom Phone Local Survivability (ZPLS) help enable continuity of communication. Zoom Node is a central hub for hosting workflows – or modules – that allow organizations to maintain certain services even if internet connectivity is lost. Beyond managing calls, you’ll also have access to interactive voice response (IVR), auto-attendant, and much more.

• Hardware: We need more than just desk phones to create a full-fledged communications experience. There’s a lot of hardware to consider, including cameras, microphones, displays, and even hard phones for those who need them. But now, organizations can tailor their hardware inventory to the ever-evolving needs of their business and their customers. That’s where hardware-as-a-service can create flexibility for your organization.
• Choice and customization: Every organization is different, and everyone should be able to choose the solution that works best for them. Integrations and extendability should be simple and straightforward for any collaboration platform. Customers can plan and meet their needs with deployment models and commercial options. At Zoom, we offer options like native calling services, PBX integrations, and Bring Your Own Carrier.

When Zoom Phone is everywhere you are – at your computer, on your mobile phone, built into your desk phone – it can help you move through your workday with the speed and ease you need. Quickly elevate a phone call into a meeting, jump from a team chat to voice communications, or send edited video clips of you and your desktop directly to colleagues. Zoom AI Companion can summarize phone calls, extract action items from voicemails, and prioritize which voicemails need your attention first. 

Zoom Workplace integrates with top business applications, content center partners, and hardware providers to make sure your communications tools meet you where you are. When you have a singular hub for all your communication needs, it reduces the silos and busy work that come from having disparate solutions scattered throughout your infrastructure.  

Learn more about Zoom Phone, our cloud-based phone solution.