Call centre disaster recovery is a hot topic. Experienced contact centre and call centre managers have learned to expect the unexpected. Whether it’s a natural disaster, power failure, equipment failure or force majeure, at some time or another, there’s a significant chance that you will have to recover your call centre due to an unforeseen event.
Call centres are complex environments with multiple points of failure. The process of recovering from a disaster is often poorly understood by management. We consider the costs, resources and technology elements of recovering from a call centre failure in this article. We hope this will help you to write a disaster recovery plan for your own call or contact centre.
Historically, call centres typically adopted one of the following approaches to recovery:
But in recent years, managing a call centre outage has become much more complicated due to a number of factors, including:
Many managers develop a false sense of security when it comes to their call centres. This is especially likely if they have not experienced a crisis situation in the past. If they are in an area with few natural disasters, many call centre managers are not aware of the potential impact of a serious situation. However, the reality is that all call centres are at risk. As an organisation’s reliance on telecommunication networks and infrastructure increases, the likelihood of a problem increases.
Include all aspects required to run the call centre, including:
Make sure all the relevant facts are at your fingertips. For example:
Inevitably, there will be a balance to be struck between minimising the time taken to shift calls to a recovery solution and the costs involved.
Key members of the recovery teams should collaborate on plan development and approve the final plan. This will ensure that all aspects are considered, but will also ensure greater ownership and buy-in if a crisis does occur in future.
The most crucial thing to consider when writing a disaster recovery plan (and the aspect most often forgotten) is that it is useless if it doesn’t work in practice. The only way to be certain that your plan will work when it has to is to perform a live test of the plan. Testing will flush out any glitches or details that mean that the plan may not work in an actual disaster situation. For example, if the mobile phone network is not working, how are you going to contact your agents?
Before launching a live test of your disaster processes, run a session to inform recovery team members of their roles and responsibilities in the event of a disaster. Active testing can then be conducted to review how the plan works in practice and identify where improvements can be made or where solutions are based on incorrect assumptions.
To prepare for a test of your disaster recovery plan, identify what you will test, at which locations and who will be involved. Create one or more outage scenarios to test different aspects of the plan. And don’t forget to test across all shift patterns, so that everyone is aware of what to do in the event of a disaster.
After testing is completed, review the results, and conduct a follow-up test if necessary. Test the plan regularly, and use different scenarios to ensure that all aspects have been considered. It’s a good idea for the scenario planner to be someone who was not involved in writing the plan, so that familiarity bias is not introduced.
Advances in technology mean that the call centre is changing dramatically. Opportunities abound for agents to work remotely, either from home, or closer to home. As high-speed wireless internet connections become the norm, the need to have agents grouped together in the same location diminishes. This means that companies can save money on property and call centre technology.
Our LiberalisNow software is a game changer in call centre systems, and can help you to effectively recover your call centre quickly and easily. That’s because it uses the very latest in WebRTC technology. This means that you can create your own online contact centre in just a few minutes. Being browser-based, no phones are required. So agents can simply plugin in a headset and they’re ready to go. It’s super-fast, incredibly simple and ultra-secure. So you can use LiberalisNow to quickly recover from a disaster situation. Or simply create your call centre using agents who can work remotely to reduce the impact of a disaster.
What’s more, with LiberalisNow there are no per-seat fees; you only pay when your agents are connected to customers. There are absolutely no monthly charges or commitments. So when you’re finished with the system, you can just switch it off and you won’t incur any further costs. You can even try LiberalisNow for free to test out its potential suitability for your disaster recovery purposes.
In an ideal world, your call centre will never have to deal with a crisis or disaster. However, it can and does happen more often than you might think. The best strategy is to be well prepared and well informed. With a good call centre disaster recovery plan in place and a team that is ready and motivated to act if necessary, your company will be in the best position to recover quickly and minimise any negative consequences. The latest WebRTC technology can be your secret weapon to ensure swift recovery in the event of a disaster. Contact us to find out more about our WebRTC call centre systems.
Source: https://antheus.co.uk/2018/06/29/call-centre-disaster-recovery/
Publish Date: June 29, 2018 |
2.) | Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more) |
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