When your hotline goes down, it can be frightening. Figuring out the issue can take time, but getting it back up is urgent. If you face a hotline outage and pressure from a third party, know what you’re entitled to:
Will I Get Something Useful From This Article?
We’ve seen agencies struggle when their hotlines go down for a long time because they don’t know their rights or have the right resources. Don’t wait for a problem to happen. Be prepared with best practices. Need help right now? Please call us.
Your Rights:
“Once you request service from a new company, your old company cannot refuse to port your number, even if you owe money for an outstanding balance or termination fee.“
—Federal Communications Commission Consumer Guide
If you are a HelplineSoftware.com customer, and your phone provider is having an outage please call our emergency line. We can quickly set up a workaround for you and even take over management for your hotline number if you’d like (this process is called porting in).
Why Did The Hotline Go Down?
There are multiple reasons your hotline could go down, but in our experience, one of the biggest is that someone didn't pay the phone company, usually for a while. Cellular network outages are another common cause. See running a hotline during cellular outage for how to handle those situations.
Frequently asked questions about hotline outages
›Does this really happen? Isn’t it easy to pay the phone bill?
This issue is pretty common, and it's not always a quick fix. It can lead to a long time of hotline downtime. Be careful, especially if your team has frequent changes, like in accounts payable.
›My organization is huge. We’re not going to have this problem, right?
It’s still possible. We've seen hotlines become unavailable for over 10 days because of phone company issues, even at large organizations with $10M+ annual revenue. They were smart to transfer their number.
Big or small, understand your rights.
A Tale Of Two Agencies:
Last year, one of our customers experienced a real problem when their phone company cut off their service due to an unpaid bill. The notification went to the wrong person, so the bill stayed unpaid. The result was a major disruption.
Agency 1: Our Customer
Within 3 minutes
We responded. There’s a reason our customers say “… customer service is responsive, honest, articulate, … it’s top-notch …”.
Within 15 minutes
We had a proposal out to the customer explaining how we could set up a backup hotline so that callers could get through.
Later that day
Our customer had some internal meetings, realized that the phone issue was a tricky one, and they asked us to set up a backup hotline for them. They called our emergency line and we had a backup hotline up and running for them within minutes.
Months later
The phone issue was still not resolved, but because this organization worked with HelplineSoftware.com their community was still able to access the services they needed.
Agency 2: Not Our Customer
What happened to the other agency? They hadn’t heard about us at the time, and their IT folks had to use a port-in process to get the hotline back up and running. Their hotline was down for about 10 days.
Key Takeaways:
- Make sure that someone is responsible for paying the phone bill, and that you have a process in place if that person leaves the organization.
- If your hotline is down, know your rights around porting.
- Want superior protection from outages for your community? Reach out and join us.
For the complete framework on routing reliability—including fallback design, overflow behavior, and distinguishing "unreachable" from "no answer"—see call routing solutions. If you need help with your hotline please reach out. We provide fully customized white glove hotline management services at prices that nonprofits can afford. CONTACT OUR TEAM
