NATURAL DISASTER OUTAGES

A natural disaster is a natural event such as a flood, earthquake, or hurricane that causes significant damage or loss of life. Contact centers are impacted in two ways by these natural disasters. First, the contact center can be shut down; employees cannot get to the center, power outages prevent the equipment from operating, and sometimes centers are destroyed. The contact center’s disaster preparedness and business continuity strategy must be seamless with zero to minimal customer impact. Today having a back up plan has never been easier, especially with cloud-based contact center software. No more worrying about that million-dollar switch getting damaged. No more stress that customers can’t get through and no more lost revenue. A hosted contact center platform can instantaneously reroute the calls to another location.

Secondly, contact centers are used to support victims of natural disasters. Contact centers can be open 24/7 and handle emergencies with an emergency hotline. Victims can call, email, or SMS to connect with emergency services to find shelters, food, water, gas, batteries, and even where they can charge their cell phone. Once basic needs are provided, victims need to get insurance companies on the line for benefits, or in the case of Hurricane Sandy, what to do with mortgages on homes that have been swept away and destroyed. All these answers come from people who answer phones in contact centers. There are contact centers that specialize in this kind of short-term contract work.

Duplicating your contact center in a second location is one disaster recovery best practice.

The alternate venue's most essential characteristic is its ability to transfer telephone calls from the original contact center. The backup plan is to set up a second location that is regionally diverse from the first one, preferably in a different climate zone. With today’s cloud-based contact center technology, setting up a contact center has never been easier. You can have agents, computers, and phones up and running in hours while your PBX-based competitors are drying out their premise-based switch.

Before cloud technology, the only option for the contact center was to be down and out.

Deploying a new premise-based switch can take millions of dollars and months to implement. Today, cloud contact centers require a phone, an internet connection, and a web browser, and you are ready to take calls.

While snowstorms can be dangerous to drive in and prevent employees from getting to work, they are not as debilitating as natural disasters. During snowstorms, people are usually tucked in their homes, safe and warm, with nothing to do but watch old movies. With a hosted contact center platform, these agents can log into the contact center software from any internet browser and start taking calls.

No more wasted workday! They are At-Home agents for the day. Agents don’t have to use PTO time because they don’t want to risk driving in the snow.

Outages stop business in its tracks. Agents sit idle at their workstations watching the phone. The longer the outage, the more difficult it is to keep agents busy doing other activities. It’s like a meter stacking up the payroll charges. Paying agents to do nothing is painful. It is incredible how many contact centers are okay with outages and chalk it up as part of doing business. Outages should be a thing of the past because with today’s technology, the contact center software has built-in disaster recovery and Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) to prevent costly outages.

Too many contact centers are still using old PBXs, and obsolete PBXs. Margins may be skinny in the contact center business, but taking the risk of an outage is even more costly than setting up your center correctly. Riding your PBX until it dies is small thinking. There is cheap, and then there is economically wise.

It isn't easy to transfer the calls from a physical switch when it is down. You need to contact the carrier, which can take days. There is also an extra charge for every leg the carrier transfers requires, perhaps another penny a minute. This can get pricey. With a cloud-based contact platform, there are no extra charges when call traffic is automatically moved.

A hosted-based contact center platform will detect a break automatically and reroute call traffic to other locations. The contact center software eliminates outages by having server redundancy. By setting up servers regionally around the country, when there are traffic problems, the software will flip call traffic to another location. This takes less than five minutes. You can see it happen instantaneously on the manager’s dashboard. The only calls lost are the ones in process.

You maintain productivity and customer satisfaction by eliminating downtime. So why are so many contact centers still using old PBXs?

No matter why there is an outage, such as a cut or downed cable, fire, flood, snow storm, or pandemic, you can connect from anywhere because you can be up and running in an alternate location as fast as you can log in. Is that fast enough for you?

The issue with disaster recovery plans is that no one knows the procedure, who owns the plan, or its location when the tornado alarm rings. Many organizations presume that someone else has prepared and secured it safely. As a site manager, locating the plan and developing one if it is missing is crucial!

A few things to consider:
— Where do you want it to go if you must reroute call traffic?
— If the contact center is physically threatened, what do you want employees to do in the case of — fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, or earthquake?
— Consider a back-up solution to the back-up solution. You need both a plan B and a plan C. How long will your back-up plan last?
— Have your emergency BPO ready to transfer calls to so you can keep your business running.
— How will you communicate with employees if phone and internet are down?
— Do you have a back-up location in case the building is damaged?

— This condition applies only to a cloud-based platform, as you cannot relocate a premise-based switch during a disaster.