Imagine a natural disaster so severe your entire business is wiped out. What would you do?
We asked that very question of Cassandra Perry, executive director, of the 163rd Street Improvement Council, who faced this traumatic issue when her organization, a non-profit providing affordable housing to the special needs, low income and homeless population of South Bronx, New York, was destroyed in a fire at Christmas time.
"We had a fire in our previous office building that wiped out everything," said Perry. "It completely took out all of our communications equipment including our Internet and phone service and as a result, we lost the ability to communicate with people. Clearly, we were in trouble."
"We do community housing not communications", continued Perry. "We needed someone to help us; someone that we could trust that was dependable and reliable."
Perry turned to Verizon to help find a solution that allowed her organization to quickly get back up and running without having to tackle the technology. Perry found the perfect solution in Verizon’s Virtual Communications Express, an end-to-end communications service that enables seamless contact with customers, partners, suppliers, and co-workers from virtually any location.
The solution is self-contained and does not rely on Perry’s infrastructure to work, which was another plus in her mind. The solution offers her business a great degree of flexibility and, more importantly, it is not location-specific, so it helps protect 163rd Street Improvement Council critical communications from natural disasters and other events out of the organization’s control.
Powered by the Verizon cloud, the solution provides an unlimited local and nationwide long distance calling plan and a business- grade feature set; state-of-the art high-definition handsets; mobile work solutions and integration with Google Apps. And, Perry loved the fact that it is backed by Verizon’s 24/7 business support.
In addition, the solution includes a mobile app that treats the user of an Apple or Android smartphone as an endpoint, allowing single number reach and enabling company associates to always appear to be calling from the company’s offices, regardless of their actual location.
"With Verizon, we are not dependent on our infrastructure," said Perry. "This solution lets us customize our approach to doing business with a virtually plug-n-play solution. We feel like we’re in control again and not dependent on some unknown which makes all the difference to us and the communities that we serve!"
View a video of the story here:
