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Seasonal Businesses: Phone Systems That Flex Up and Down
Seasonal businesses face a telephony problem that most system designs ignore: demand is highly predictable and highly variable. A business that triples its call volume for eight weeks and then runs at a third of peak for the rest of the year is paying all year for capacity it uses briefly, or scrambling to obtain capacity when it needs it. A system that flexes in both directions is the goal, and both directions require planning.
The Two Failure Modes
| Failure mode | What it looks like | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Overprovisioned | Licences and channels sized for peak, retained all year | Paying peak cost for eleven off-peak months |
| Underprovisioned | Capacity sized for average, unchanged into peak | Dropped and failed calls during the period that generates the revenue |
| Manual panic | Extra capacity sourced during the peak | Premium cost and lead-time delays |
| Complex temporary setup | Separate system for the peak period | Duplicated administration and data |
Flexing Up Ahead of the Season
- Licences — Confirm expansion licence cost and provisioning lead time; provision before the season, not during
- Trunk channels — Size for peak concurrent calls with headroom, and book carrier capacity in advance
- Handsets — Pre-order temporary handsets and confirm delivery dates; temporary staff cannot wait for hardware
- Temporary accounts — Provision user accounts and voicemail in advance so day one is not spent on administration
- Network readiness — Confirm switched port capacity and PoE coverage for temporary desk locations
- Testing — Load test to the projected peak before the season starts
Flexing Down After the Season
Reducing cost after the season is where most organisations fail, because licence reductions often carry minimum terms and because trunk capacity contracts may not be month-to-month. Knowing the reduction terms before the season starts, rather than after, is what determines whether the down-flex is real. A documented reduction schedule agreed at the start of the season is the single most useful planning artefact.
Using Routing to Manage Seasonal Demand
Not all seasonal calls are equally valuable. Enquiries that can be handled without a person should be deflected, and calls that require seasonal staff can be routed to a dedicated seasonal ring group whose membership is expanded and contracted with the workforce. Because the ring group is separate, the permanent team does not receive seasonal call traffic after the season, which protects answer rates during the rest of the year.
Temporary Staff Onboarding at Volume
The operational challenge is often user administration rather than capacity. Thirty seasonal staff arriving in one week need accounts, handsets, voicemail greetings, and training. Where the platform supports directory import, provision the seasonal cohort in one operation rather than individually, and use a single consistent voicemail greeting so callers reach the right team regardless of which person answered.
Reporting Across Seasons
Seasonal reporting is most useful when compared across years rather than read within a season. Establishing consistent reporting categories each year means that this season's answer rate can be compared with last season's under the same definitions, which is what allows a business to tell whether its seasonal staffing is getting better or worse over time.
Redstone Approach
Redstone IP-PBX platforms support licence expansion and reduction, additional trunk channel provisioning, directory import for seasonal cohorts, and separate ring groups for seasonal teams. Redstone can plan a seasonal capacity profile, including the advance booking of trunk capacity and the reduction schedule, so the peak is provisioned before it arrives and the cost is not retained afterwards.
Redstone supports seasonal businesses with planned capacity expansion and reduction, seasonal cohort provisioning, dedicated seasonal ring groups, and year-on-year reporting consistency.
Redstone Systems, Inc. founded in Delaware, USA in December 2002, has been the ODM vendor for many well-known communications companies, serving the Southeast Asian market. In 2020, Redstone Systems will begin to return to the North America market with its self-developed brand.
Redstone has a complete product line of intelligent voice gateways, providing IP-PBXs, analog VoIP gateways (FXS/FXO), digital VoIP gateways (E1/T1), border appliances, and session boundary controllers (SBCs).
With advanced technology in digital signal processor (DSP), speech coding and speech processing, as well as efficient operational tools such as cloud remote management, auto provisioning, Redstone gateways are widely used in markets of enterprise communications, cloud communications, call centers, operators’ IMS/SIP trunks, bringing users friendly, efficient and reliable communication experience.
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