The Atlantic hurricane season started on June 1, just days after the massive 4.5-mile wide tornado tore through the Oklahoma City suburbs with wind gusts up to 200 miles per hour. More than 20,000 homes and businesses were directly affected by the storm. Including Superstorm Sandy, the U.S. suffered through 24 additional floods, storms, droughts, heat waves and wildfires in 2011 and 2012. Natural disasters are not only transforming our planet and those affected by such forces, but also the way customer service should be handled. Companies must evaluate their contact centers’ level of preparedness for natural disasters. A contact center’s disaster preparedness and business continuity strategy needs to be seamless, with zero to minimal impact on the data center, agents and customers.
To prepare for anything Mother Nature throws at them and ensure an “always-on” customer experience, here are six tips and accompanying questions companies must keep in mind:
1. Be your company’s and customers’ hero before the storm. Make disaster preparedness and business continuity planning a priority. Take the time to create a plan. Too many companies assume someone, somewhere in the organization must have THE disaster preparedness and business continuity plan. Rather than waiting until the electricity is out or the tornado alarms are sounding, locate a plan that might exist, take the initiative to find it. If it doesn’t exist, create it.
a. Ask yourself: Who in my organization owns the disaster plan and recovery process?
2. Examine your assumptions carefully. A good disaster plan provides sample scenarios such as in the event of a tornado, do this; in the event a fire, do this, etc. But the contact center is a mission critical department for most companies. Any assumptions made for planning purposes need to specifically apply to the operation of the contact center and not be blanket assumptions applicable to every other department. For example, mobile phones are a natural ‘plan b’ in the event that phone service fails, which is typical for any department. But in the contact center where incoming and outgoing calls are the core function, what if mobile phone systems also fail? Just as individuals have ‘in-case-of-emergency’ contacts, what or who is your contact center’s ‘in-case-of-emergency’ contact?
a. Ask yourself: What is at least one back-up solution for each back-up solution?
3. Duration of the back-up plan. The size and severity of natural disasters is forcing disaster planners to extend the duration of time that the back-up solutions have to be in place. Contact center providers are wise to have the ultimate emergency plan in place, which is an emergency outsource partner. The emergency outsource partner can typically provide two important functions to keep your business operating during a local disaster: 1) all incoming calls can be routed to the outsourcer’s platform; 2) failover team of agents can be immediately engaged to take calls from your customers.
An emergency failover partner is typically a cloud contact center provider who also has access to its own team of agents or access to a community of independent contractors. Whether an in-house team of employees or independent contractor agents, the value of an emergency outsource partner is in helping you keep your business running.
a. Ask yourself: How long will each of my back-up solutions last?
b. Ask yourself: Who is my failover emergency partner?
4. If you have a cloud or hosted contact center infrastructure, it’s critical that you partner with a vendor who shares your same views when it comes to disaster planning.
a. Ask yourself: Does my cloud or hosted vendor have redundant failover and highly available architecture?
b. Ask Yourself: Can my cloud or hosted vendor quickly redirect traffic across all of my customer channels, including social and mobile, away from the storm’s reach to a different data center with zero to extremely minimal impact on any of my customers?
5. During a disaster, communicating with contact center agents to ensure customer service continues can be difficult. If traditional phone and Internet services are impacted, it is important to establish an alternate way of communicating with agents to alert them of the company’s status, such as mobile phones.
a. Ask Yourself: How do you contact your employees in unusual situations when phone or internet systems are unavailable?
6. Identify a team of employees who are versatile in their skill sets to execute a disaster recovery plan. They must be informed of their roles and duties to assist in getting the company up and running as quickly as possible.
a. Ask Yourself: Who on your team can you trust to keep the company’s customer service initiatives fully functioning during a storm?
7. Organizations can suffer physical building damage during disasters, making them inoperable. In this scenario, it is critical for organizations to establish back-up location(s) where the company can still function outside of the disaster zone.
a. Ask Yourself: Can customer service inquiries be re-routed to another location?
8. More and more premise-based contact centers are migrating to the cloud, which has inherent disaster recovery built into the platform, such as customer service inquiries can be re-routed to other locations, such as agents’ homes, and geographies outside the affected area.
a. Ask Yourself: Have you considered the benefits of moving your contact center to the cloud?
9. Consider all scenarios from equipment failures to real-world use cases and create plans to handle each one.
a. Ask Yourself: Have you identified scenarios in which your disaster recovery strategy would need to be activated?
b. Ask Yourself: Do you have a back-up plan that is tested frequently?
If your organization addresses the tips above, your contact center will be one step closer to ensuring an “always-on” customer service experience.
# # #