Staffing Software Firm Weathers the Storm to Support Clients

March 1st, 2010

As a Hudson Valley, NY based staffing software company, we’re not accustom to the natural disasters that can terrorize the rest of the world, such as the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, tsunamis, or hurricanes. However, this is no excuse for us to be unprepared since we do get an occasional blizzard or thunderstorm. That’s all it takes to throw the monkey-wrench of an extended power failure into our business and that of our clients in the staffing industry who depend on us for support of all their staffing software needs.

And last week, that’s exactly what happened Thursday and Friday the AccuWeather-dubbed “snowicane” rolled into the Northeast and dumped about 2 ft of snow taking out power in our region from Thursday evening into the weekend. A state of emergency was declared and no one was allowed on the roads, which makes getting to work troublesome, plus no power at our office means no servers or phones.

My cell phone, which fortunately still had some juice, rang early Friday morning and it was Doug Newman, AST’s President on the phone. We know that on Fridays many of our clients are finishing up invoice processing and printing some checks from late timecards or corrections. Therefore, it was important to notify our client-base of our situation and provide some means of emergency support.

Fortunately, we are prepared to work remotely and found that Chantel, manager of AST’s support department, and Kristy, QA manager, had power. I called Kristy and walked her through the process of sending an email to our clients through our Constant Contact account, about our “black-out/white-out” and instructing them to send emergency issues to our company Gmail account since our servers were down. For the remainder of the day Kristy and Chantel monitored the gmail account – as they say “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Meanwhile, Frank Salustro who runs Labortemps, Inc., a temporary staffing firm based out of Jamaica, NY,ran into a snag;he was unable to print payroll checks out of his Instapay system, which enables staffing firms to print payroll checks for people as they come in the door and hand in their timecards. Frank was in “crisis mode,” as he described it and got through to Chantel who resolvedthe situation and gotFrank back up and cutting checks for the people who wanted to get paid before the weekend. A true emergency, a dedicated support team,a relieved staffing executive, and happily paid temps!

First off, a real big thanks to Chantel and Kristy who held down the virtual support fort throughout the storm. And also thanks to our clients for being very understanding of our situation, being willing to work with us, and sending uspositive messages such as “hope things get better” and “we’re praying for you” after hearing about our situation.Things are getting better and our office is back up and running, but there are still 18,000+ in our county without power, which is difficult during the winter, especially for the elderly. On a lighter note, checkout Snowpocalypse to snowicane: Hype reigns in winter on all the funny terminology that has been swirling around to describe this year’s weather.

Also, email me ev@astusa.com for some tips on how to prepare to support your clients through emergency situations and checkout the pictures below of our office and town that got hit by the storm, which will probably make Southern Californian’s gasp and Minnesotans skeptically remark, “You had a state of emergency for that!”