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Article : Contact Center Continuity=Disaster Recovery + Availability Planning + Execution

You've invested in systems and agents to assure that your customers get the best care. But what happens when that center isn't up and running due to fire, flood, earthquakes or man-made catastrophes? Your customers will be the first to know, and in today's business climate, no company can afford that price.

For all of the cold sweats that this thought might create, disaster recovery is just the most visible part of the story, and represents only about 20% of downtime. Planning for the availability of a call center that serves your critical business needs goes beyond responding to disasters – it means providing for events that occur in the normal course of business, including your scheduled upgrades and maintenance.

Scheduled events for upgrades and maintenance, together with unplanned events, account for approximately 80% of downtime. A key to executing a business continuity plan in order to keep your business running and serving customers, is to develop a strategy that assesses and captures the value of each product/system.

The strategy should assess how business processes, partners, and technology can help you, as well as the limitations of each tool.


The Components of Contact Center Business Continuity

Keys To Planning And Assessment:

  • Either/or, not yes/no planning decisions

  • Coordination between business units & IT

  • Update periodically

Business is always about "either/or" decisions—either I invest in a new plant for capacity, or I expand my sales force in Singapore—not simple "yes/no" decisions. Every contact center needs a business continuity plan, but as any parent can tell you, fairness comes from treating everyone the way he or she needs, not by treating everyone the same. Similarly, not every plan will be the same. Some contact centers have products and systems that simply do not require five 9's of reliability, and your plan needs to reflect this knowledge up-front.

This is the first question you will need to ask in building your strategy for business continuity: what is the trade-off between deploying a comprehensive solution and the damage that may be done? The damage may include direct lost revenue/customer interactions and partner relationships, but also the lost opportunity to demonstrate reliability and stability to your customers in a time of crisis. You have already started to answer a part of this question through your decision to house your contact center in a single site or multiple sites, and through your decisions regarding what to outsource and what to keep. In finishing the answer to the question, you will need to ensure that this decision is made jointly, by both operating business units and the IT department, since neither group can both understand the specifics of the business and understand the overall strategy. This is also critical because most downtime will not come from a catastrophe, so the cost-benefit analysis becomes especially acute.

We've found in our work with insurance carriers that the trade-off heavily favors high levels of protection, due to the possibility of significant business impacts – just as one would expect, since insurance customers are likely to require assistance at the very time of a catastrophic event. This might just be the assurance that the company still has the lights on and can pay an insurance claim when the flood waters recede. But, of course, planning for and avoiding disasters only keeps them partly afloat. A contact center for insurance will sometimes handle very sensitive customer data—emails requesting adjusted rates, new policy inquiries, medical information—that regulators require in order to keep the doors open, and financial markets require in order to maintain the debt ratings that allow writing certain kinds of policies. Having said that, the priority in allocating resources for a carrier writing many kinds of policies would have to be those affecting health and safety, followed by property, and finally, liability and other policies, as this is what customers and regulators will demand. The key issue is to make that IT/BU decision by distinguishing differing levels of value for differing products.

Keys To Business Processes:

  • Clearly Defined

  • Well-practiced

Business processes can serve both as a relatively inexpensive route for disaster recovery, and as a needed source of calm and direction for employees during a crisis, but there are areas in which your processes may need to be augmented. Important processes to ensure that you have in place are emergency management and a business response, but the real key to this portion of your contact center continuity strategy is to make sure that your processes are clearly defined and well practiced.

Emergency management represents table stakes in contact center continuity. Since it goes to planning and managing the very people who will run everything else—contact center and support employees—if you don't get this right, nothing else can work. Imagine your own reactions to the feeling that "something bad" has happened. Your first questions will be "what happened?" and "how do I protect everything I care about?" Of course, your first action will be to pick up the phone and call someone, but let's hold that thought for a bit.

Putting your manager hat back on, you might need to evacuate a building, get information out to your employees, and begin to execute your disaster recovery plan. Your technology plan will obviously be a key determinant of how you get those messages across, but if your employees know the plan and have practiced it, you can execute your next steps. However, if someone doesn't know what it means when "the alarm that never goes off" actually does go off, your emergency coordinator will be stuck wondering whether he or she has gotten everyone to safety, and nothing else will happen. This may be especially dangerous for the single-site contact center, but also may be able to put a ripple through multiple sites.

The business response comes either after the emergency management, or just during day-to-day non-catastrophic events that threaten contact center continuity. If you run multiple sites, how will you adjust the staffing at each location? Can you call in off-shifts, move people from one center to another, or perhaps off-load to third parties?

For either a single or multiple-site solution, is training in place to help key employees understand the difference in response to a flood of virus-laden spam coming into the contact center and a natural disaster? Unnecessarily triggering the most dramatic responses is not only a huge expense, but can cause the very customer and organizational disruptions in a contact center that they were meant to avoid. For these non-catastrophic downtime events, good planning and process training can literally mean the difference between significant customer-impacting disruptions and none whatsoever.

Keys To Partners/Technology:

  • Single Site vs. Multi-site

  • Production vs. Protection

  • Security & Protection

  • Robustness/Recovery

Partners can serve as a good hedge against risk, through essentially "selling" that risk to them, but the worst thing in the world is to pay for this service for months and get surprised when the chips are down. Technology, as the current stop-and-start economy tells us all, is a great tool when focused on a few key areas. Together, partners and technology represent the tantalizing prospect of early detection, avoidance, or off-loading to most elegantly handle the worst situations. Not surprisingly, this is also the most dangerous place for your budget, as buying too much or not enough of either can be very painful.

More than any other aspect of your strategy, this area demands different measures for a multi-site vs. single-site contact center. A single site has really two choices: close down or move everything somewhere else. In making the decision, it's important to balance continuity vs. cost of operations. A trailer can be pulled up to your contact center, ready to go out of the box, but the costs – including charges for having the service available, charges for each deployment and added costs and complexity of working this into your business processes (training, added costs of drills/practice) – limit the applicability of this approach. Another approach is to be very crisp about the technology—automatic intelligent rerouting of calls, portable 800 numbers, switching to hybrid response media (e-mail, web), and using networks to provide reliability that one or a small number of discrete sites will not be able to match.

Balancing a load between two sites, with each site running able to pick up much of the slack is a good way to get more production out of your protection than a "spare tire" approach. You can take this capability to the next level through route advance technology that will take a look at a line or trunk group, and make sure it's not busy/down before putting a valuable call on it. And of course, all of this needs to be wrapped up into a good management tool that really gives you a view of the effect of your plans.

The best use of technology or a partner is to detect and manage issues before they become catastrophes, to plan for and support availability, not just disasters. How do your partners and technology fit into your everyday planned upgrades and maintenance, and are the technologies you've put in place cost-effective to be deployed for less severe events? A technology or a partner that will serve for 20% of downtime is important—it's insurance—but it's even more important to be ready for all of the smaller things that really impact your P&L. It is critical to assess and plan for e-mail intrusions (viruses, spam), security breaches, and other problems that are more insidious than a catastrophe because they are often unseen. Testing and probing for problems will bring them to light early enough to avoid the next bump in the road, which is the real role of business continuity strategy for contact centers.

Every contact center will see a disruption eventually. How can you assure that you will be up and running as quickly as possible, to avoid becoming one of the disaster-related bankruptcies that you read about? Managing the emergency is key, and automatic impromptu conference calls are a valuable enabling technology. Recovery also comes from diversity—diverse routes to the POP, connection to diverse POPs, and diversity of access. You can accomplish the latter by selecting diverse carriers and/or through alternative technologies. Having employees unable to work from the contact center is the perfect opportunity to use your WLAN or WWAN connectivity to not only manage the emergency, but get back up to speed without paying significant dollars for a purely protective service, since you will have been using these technologies in the usual course of business.

Putting It All Together
Assuring continuity for your contact center asks the questions no one really wants to think about. If everyone knows the drill, you have the assets in the right places to selectively manage/reroute the most important business, and your tools and partners have been carefully chosen, then your contact centers will see fewer, less severe disruptions. Most importantly, you will have put just the right amount of resources toward protecting these critical customer-facing assets. It's always important to ensure a balanced approach, keeping in mind that much of the downtime will come from small things, not just front-page disasters, and deploy assets accordingly.


About T-Mobile:
Company LogoT-Mobile is a mobile telephony provider, owned by Deutsche Telekom (the T stands for Telekom). It operates several GSM networks in Europe and the United States. T-Mobile also has financial stakes in mobile operators in Central and Eastern Europe. Globally, T-Mobile has some 350 million subscribers.
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