Happy Halloween: Spooky Telecom Horror Stories

We’ve reached that spooky time of year again - everyone is scrambling for last-minute costume inspiration, binge-watching Netflix’s horror category, and eagerly awaiting that post-Halloween candy sale. What better way to celebrate the season than by sharing some spooky telecom horror stories and scenarios?

Phone System Hacking

Forget Michael Meyers, Freddy Krueger, and Leatherface. For a small business owner, few things are more terrifying than finding out your software has been hacked. Take it from Nadine Speirs, a Manitoba-based small business owner who was hit with a $61,332 bill after fraudsters accessed her business's phone lines, resulting in sky-high long-distance charges from Bell. Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated incident. People often overlook their third-party private branch exchange system and don’t realize that their dated technology is leaving them vulnerable to fraudulent activity until it’s too late.

net2phone Canada offers unlimited international calling to over 40 countries and has protections in place to prevent high-cost international calling to areas that you do not need to reach. We also enable user authentication, firewalls, and encryption methods to add layers of security. For fraud to occur, the hacker would need physical access to the device as well as the username and password for each phone. To avoid a fraudster fright of your own, call your provider and ask what protections they put in place to ensure your business remains secure.

The Tale of the Ghostly Salesperson

Whether or not you’re one to believe in the paranormal, it seems as though every business owner has experienced a ghost encounter of their own. It often goes a little something like this…

Following weeks of research and product demos, you’ve finally settled on a new phone system for your business. You were sold on an impressive list of features, the promise of perfect call quality, and a surprisingly low cost per seat. A painstaking onboarding process and a few months of call disruptions later, you realize that the service that you are contractually stuck with is simply not what was promised to you. To top it all off, the salesperson who hounded you for weeks seems to have disappeared out of thin air the second a problem arose. You’ve been ghosted! Spooky, right?

Unfortunately, this is a very common issue for Canadian business owners. In fact, according to the Commission for Complaints for Telecom Services’ (CCTS) the second most common issue raised in complaints to telecom providers was non-disclosure or misleading information about contract terms. Don’t allow your business to be haunted by poor phone service! When choosing a business phone solution provider, make sure you:

• Find out the size of the provider’s customer base and their current client churn rate
• Ensure the provider has a Quality of Service (QoS) strategy in place to ensure you can rely on their service
• Make sure that the contract pricing is clear and straightforward so you don’t get hit with “surprise” additional fees

For more tips on choosing a cloud-based business VoIP solution, download our Step by Step guide for free today!

The Sinister Storm

Nearly every classic horror flick begins with an eerie storm scene - queue The Shining, Psycho, & The Fog, to name a few. While these films often lead to a particularly sinister ending, storms and outages can have an unnerving impact on small businesses. A 2019 study confirmed that the 2 most significant reasons Canadian businesses faced interruptions over the past 5 years were due to winter storms (36%) and communications failures (35%). As a Canadian business ourselves, we have experienced first-hand how tornados, snowfall, and thunderstorms, can derail operations. That’s why it’s important to choose a business VoIP provider that has a disaster recovery process in place.

Search for a VoIP provider that has automatic failover, meaning there is a backup operational mode in which the functions of your phone system will be assumed by a secondary component in the event of an outage. For example, net2phone Canada has multiple data centres across Canada so that if one centre is affected, all communications will be rerouted to a secondary site automatically.

Luckily, net2phone Canada clients don’t need to be wary of storms - unless weathering said storm means heading to a foreboding roadside inn, which cinematically doesn’t seem to end well. The plug and play functionality of our Yealink devices allow users to take their phone system with them whether they’re in the office, or at home to wait out a storm. Our Mobile App also enables clients to transfer any calls from their extension to their mobile device, meaning your business can continue to remain responsive no matter the weather.