As the east coast gears up for the blizzard, we wanted to remind you that ARG is here to help you weather the storm. We’ve been in touch with our carriers to make sure resources have been lined up to respond as quickly possible for restore and repair. ARG is here to assist you when troubles arise. We are here to answer your calls, open tickets, escalate with the carriers and provide technical consulting and troubleshooting along the way.
Please use in the order below when reporting your trouble or reaching out for status:
1. Hotline: 703-770-2400 / 866-521-5174
2. Support@myarg.com for non urgent issues or if you can’t get through via phone
3. www.twitter.com/my_arg/ for updates on widespread outages
Right now it looks like most of the event will happen outside of core business hours, but many people will probably work from home to avoid the potential afternoon traffic mess. We’ve also seen numerous warnings in the DC area that clean up may stretch into Monday and with DC, MD, and Virginia already declaring a state of emergency, school closings are rolling in already for Friday.
Below are some helpful tips:
- Use Audio and Web Conferences, but do not schedule them on the hour. Using audio and web conference tools to keep meetings is a great productivity option. Scheduling audio conferences on the hour, however, is the peak usage time for audio conferencing providers. It is not uncommon, during large weather events, for the provider conference bridges to reach capacity. When the providers do hit maximum utilization, new participants receive busy signals when they attempt to join. ARG’s suggestion is to move the meeting start time by 15 minutes. Scheduling meetings to start at 15 or 45 minutes past the hour improves your chances of everyone getting on.
- Record out of office messages and forward phones today. You would be surprised at how many people think they know how to change their phone remotely, but actually can’t when required to do so. Set your phone up for the worst case scenario and then you can revert back to normal settings should your employees make it into work.
ARG is on the job during snow days. We are blessed with the latest productivity tools that allow us to be fully available anywhere. Our hosted voice platform allows us to take, transfer and place calls from any location on our smart phones, tablets or computers just as though we are sitting at our desks. Our desktop as a service platform gives us complete access to our hosted infrastructure, office resources and tools from any internet connection.
If you are interested in how to keep your employees productive when they cannot reach the office, let’s set up a meeting. Contact your Account Manager or email info@myarg.com .
We look forward to helping you and your team through the storm.
Please be safe and stay warm.
