A refreshing corporate response to the recent health and economic challenge

The headlines and press relations and social media are filled with corporate responses to the recent health and economic challenge.  Many of the corporate responses are a bit discouraging — Apple closing its iPhone stores, airlines canceling flights.  Many other corporate responses are predictable but a bit ham-fisted — hotel chains with emails to me in which the supposed communications goal is to let me know that they are cleaning each guest room extra well, but poorly concealed is a rather desperate plea that I will please book a room at one of their hotels so that they can make a little money.  Other corporate responses, for example from banks and other service industries, try to put the best face they can on the cutting back of their opening hours.  A remaining category of corporate response is to covertly raise prices, typically by keeping the nominal price the same while cutting back on the variety or quantity or timeliness of services or hours of operation.  Which brings us to a frankly encouraging corporate response from one of our favorite service providers. 

Our favorite telephone company these days (see blog article and blog article and blog article and blog article and and blog article) is Voip.ms. This is one of the companies which hopefully you were already using before this recent health and economic challenge.  And because you were already using this company, when the time came to set up work-from-home arrangements for your employees, it would be super easy to do so.

What I heard the other day from Voip.ms is this:

As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to develop, all the team at VoIP.ms is prepared and committed to providing support in every way we can whether you have fast-paced projects to move people at home or if your team needs any assistance achieving business continuity with your communication services. Starting today, our support will be available around the clock (24×7) through live chat, e-mail and tickets.

Yeah.  They were already charging a mere 85¢ per month for a telephone line.  They were already providing free-of-charge cloud PBX services.  But their tech support was only available about 14 hours a day with shorter hours on weekends and holidays.  Now it is 24×7 tech support.

So now even in the face of this very troubled economy, the Voip.ms company is providing more services, not less.  And it is not raising its prices to cover the broadened services.  I call this a very refreshing corporate response.

Comments welcome.

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