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Article : Irma and Harvey, Test Disaster Preparedness, Recovery and Business Continuity

#contactcenterworld, @taylor_reach

Irma and Harvey, Test Disaster Preparedness, Recovery and Business Continuity | The Taylor Reach Group Inc.

A disaster? It’ll never happen to your business or Contact Center. There hasn’t been a major storm in your area in living memory. That kind of stuff happens to centers in Tornado Alley and Key West, not where you are. Don’t be so sure—there are many kinds of disasters and any one of them could visit your center today.

Cheyenne, Wyoming is high plains desert, getting only 12 inches of rain a year. It was the last place you’d expect a flood. But on August 1, 1985, Cheyenne got more than six inches of rain in less than four hours, and the resulting flood killed 12, injured many more, and shut down many businesses for days or weeks.

In the 1950’s, the US Navy moved its entire fleet of planes from Pensacola, Florida, to Olathe, Kansas, the night before a predicted hurricane in Pensacola. The next day was beautiful in Pensacola…and a tornado hit Olathe and destroyed the fleet.

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes, and they are, by definition, unpredictable. In addition to weather, we can have lines cut, power outages, train derailments, flu epidemics, and so much more. Now is the time to prepare.



The three disasters over the last couple of weeks in Houston, Florida and Mexico highlight the need for a business continuity plan, sometimes known as a disaster recovery plan or outage plan. This is especially relevant to Contact Centers. While the impact of hurricanes on business is the most relevant right now, in consideration of Irma, Harvey, Jose, and Katia, when establishing a business continuity plan, there are many situations to consider:

a. Evacuation: Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, disease, and train or truck related collisions can all cause the need for evacuation. You will need to not only have an evacuation plan, you will also need to determine what treatment callers and contacts will receive during your evacuation process. For example, will caller be directed to a recorded message, will the calls be redirected to another center, will the calls be redirected to the same agents once they at a hot-site or other remote location(s), etc.

b. Power outages: Diesel powered generator, with battery backup to keep the computers up during those seconds before the generator kicks in. Test it regularly, have preventive maintenance done, keep it filled with fuel, and enter a contract with a company that can provide more fuel in a long-term outage. System outage: Backup systems in at least two different geographical areas, regular backups kept offsite in secure storage. Unable to reach the center for weather, infrastructure or health reasons: systems that allow work from home, with equipment like laptops and headsets available at a convenient location away from the center or at agents’ homes; contracts with backup centers that agents can travel to; agreements with companies whose agents can take your calls in a disaster. Remember that while some disasters may only last for a day or two, others could be weeks. How would 2 weeks without power impact your plan?

Considerations for Preparing a Business Continuity Plan:

1) Preplan for Disasters: Preplan what to do in each type of disaster. Consider the differences between being denied access to the office due to road blockage versus the office being non-functional, aka flooded. In one case, we had a direct experience with a client where the center was cut off by repeated snowfalls that stopped anyone from getting into the office for over a week. The office was functional but unreachable. But, since the firm had a work from home program running for many years, they did not have to move to their backup center over 2 hours away. Luck or good planning, you tell me.

2) Document Your Disaster Recovery Plan: Document, document, document the plan and make sure everyone knows their part. From who can declare an emergency, to who can authorize carriers to implement emergency routing, and of course who can or will declare an emergency over, and how will that be communicated to everyone.

3) Business Records: Make sure to have offsite or cloud records, preferably electronic and available on a moments notice. For Call and Contact Centers (CC’s), this means the Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) and other systems should be available to you in locations other than head office. If you can already work from home, you already have the infrastructure to do this.

4) Redundancy is Mandatory: Does the data center provide redundancy with another center not anywhere near either the office or data center? If not, get one. Without the data, your business is dead in a few days or weeks at the longest. This is your best insurance and protection in order to stay in business.

5) Establish Disaster Recovery Impacting All Business Factors: Disaster recovery plans typically include the following:

a. Facilities – an emergency power generator, an alternate site
b. Network and Systems – rerouting of calls, backup systems (database backup)
c. People – evacuation, an emergency advice system
d. Service levels – planning IVR changes, rerouting of calls

6) Calculate the Cost of Being Out of Business: Calculating the impact of being out of business provides context and guidance to developing recovery plans. In revenue-producing environments, the cost of being out of business is to put into economic terms. Factors to consider:

a. Direct loss of productivity

b. Indirect loss of productivity

c. The impact on the queue, telecom and handling time

d. Loss of revenues, clients, staff

7) Informed Employees: Ensure all employees know the plan and what they can and should do, when.

8) Emergency Messaging for Employees: Establish an emergency IVR/Auto messaging or collaboration tool to reach out to and coordinate with all current employees with timely and critical information; from the basic, ‘Don’t come into work’ to ‘All clear, return to work in X days’. Messages can include assembling points or locations to continue working etc. Some systems can be set up to dial each employee to ask their status and whether or not they can work, are they OK etc.

9) Emergency Messaging for Clients: Provide emergency messaging for all clients, callers etc. across all channels in advance of needing them. Check and trial this works before using it. Most suppliers are happy to do a quarterly test of emergency routing of calls or message intercepts during both work and non-work hours. Be proactive. The more detailed information you can provide the better; don’t leave your customers guessing. Utilize multi-recipient/bulk channels. Reach as many customers as you can before they attempt to reach out to you and clog your 1:1 channels. Make sure front facing customer channels like your websites and their links work. This is not the time to have dead-end links or incorrect contact information posted.

10) Long-Term Plans: Provision for a loss of the complete office and center for the long term. Where will you move, when and under what conditions?

Where Disaster Recovery Plans Err:

There are times when disaster recovery plans are put in place, however, they still seem to fumble in miscalculations.

a. Ensure your disaster recovery plan considers the worst-case scenario. Only having 2 days’ worth of fuel for your generator won’t do if a hurricane can knock out power for a week or more.

b. The alternate site is geographically too close to the main site. In situations such as natural disasters, it is important to consider where your alternative location is in respect to the main site and the likelihood of the secondary location receiving similar impact to ultimately cause postponement of operations.

c. Practice makes perfect. Much like we practiced fire-drills in school, it is important to practice implementation of a disaster recovery plan, systems, processes, and protocols. One outsourcer we know redirected calls between two geographically diverse centers quarterly as a live test of re-routing and to ensure a level of proficiency. This will ensure a smoother flow in actual times of emergency. Have a plan C, &

D. Disaster Recovery is never fully tested until the disaster happens and by then it will be too late to rethink or reassign assets.

Proper planning is essential to a smooth and effective business continuity plan. Don’t allow your center to be a victim, plan and prepare for disasters and you and your employees can survive and continue to support your customers and clients.

#contactcenterworld, @taylor_reach


About Colin Taylor:
For the past 33 years Colin has worked in the call and contact center industry starting as a agent, Today he assists clients improve the operation effectiveness and customer satisfaction achieved by their centers. A frequent speaker and author more than 100 articles on call and contact center operations.

About The Taylor Reach Group:
Company LogoThe Taylor Reach Group is a call center and contact center consultants specializing in customer experience consulting and call and contact center consulting, management, performance, technologies, site selection, tools and assessments. All we do is customer experience and contact center consulting: strategic and tactical. Our contact center and customer experience consultants have helped management in hundreds of contact centers and organizations achieve – and exceed – their business goals.
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Today's Tip of the Day - Utilize Time & Money Saving Tools

Read today's tip or listen to it on podcast.

Published: Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Printer Friendly Version Printer friendly version

2024 Buyers Guide Analytics

 
1.) 
Alvaria

Noble IQ
Turn business insights into actionable intelligence. Noble’s IQsolutions provide you with rich and robust customer data that can transform your business. Automate decision making and campaign management and refine the quality of interactions with precision and efficiency. We have developed proprietary and patented tools to help you make sense of data on your current operations and then help you make strategic decisions to improve performance and efficiency. Identify who your best customers and prospects are and the ideal methods to reach them. Understand what types of campaigns work best for your business and how to optimize underperforming campaigns. And nake real-time decisions rather than looking back to see what went wrong.

2.) 
BPA Quality

Call Center Quality Monitoring
Outsourced call center quality solutions including Multi-lingual, Multi-Channel Quality Monitoring, Call Center Consulting, Psychometrics & Analysis of Customer-Agent Interactions, Cloud-based Quality Analysis Software configured by Needs, Virtual & In-person Training, Speech Analytics & Speech Analytics Management.

3.) 
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)

4.) 
DialogTech

DialogAnalytics™
Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more.

AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away.

With DialogAnalytics, you can get a...
(read more)

5.) 
eGain Corporation

eGain Analytics
eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively.

6.) 
Pointel

CXi - Customer Experience Insights
Pointel CXi, the IVR analytics platform, maps the entire customer journey and analyzes calls end-to-end to turn data into actionable insights. Centralized reporting is essential for seamless customer journeys, as it is critical to know where calls are transferred or abandoned.

CXi generates multiple reports on IVR performance, the Customer-IVR interactions, and sticking points in the IVR that cause customers to struggle. CXi’s IVR Analytics platform provides a comprehensive understanding of customer engagement.

Pointel Customer Experience Insights (CXi) delivers actionable information that enables businesses to reduce customer effort, operational costs and increase contact center effi...
(read more)

7.) 
PRILINK

SIP-Trunk Demarc Monitor
Analyzes SIP signalling and RTP audio stream of every call passing through the network demarcation point. Provide a real time 24/7/365 network baseline database that contains the IP bandwidth, call traffic of up to 128 voice groups, Call Detail Record (CDR), call blockage and MOS voice quality. All information are displayed in SIP-Trunk dashboards and are used in many applications, such as Telco collaboration, UC/CC analytics, Work Force Optimization (WFO) and caller identification.

8.) 
Vads

Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions.

Typical objectives of Social Media include increasing revenues, reducing customer service costs, getting feedback on products and services and improving public opinion of a particular product or business division.

Key the activities involved:

Analyzing net sentiment score
Qualitative and quantitative of sentiment analysis
Measure the emotions (6 Emotions) of the consumers
Mapping out all potential advocates
Measuring a nationwide consumer sentiment
Unlimited data extraction & cleaning
Customized positive and negative keywords
Qualitative and quantitative insights & report writing
Measuring the consumer sentiment

9.) 
QPC Ltd.

QPC Live
QPC provides realtime unstructured and structured data analytics solutions and services to contact centres globally.
We provide a complete end-to-end customer integrated offering powered by a Multichannel Intelligence Gateway which collects and inter-relates all customer interactions, from each and every customer contact across an entire contact centre ecosystem, all in real-time.
We also provide solutions for conversational and interaction analytics with solutions from our specialist portfolio.

10.) 
Tethr

Tethr is a cloud-based conversation intelligence platform that combines AI, machine learning and over a decade of customer experience and sales best-practice research to surface contextual insights from phone calls, chats, emails and other customer interactions. Companies use Tethr to turn large amounts of unstructured voice of customer conversation data into insights they can deploy to improve their customer experience.

11.) 
Trillys Systems

ActuCall
Imagine for a moment that you are a call center manager responsible for generating revenue through signing new customers or up-selling to existing ones. Imagine that your KPI is telling you you have an abandonment rate of 5% and someone comes along and says "No, your abandonment rate or dropped call rate is 13%." .." How do I know? AcutuCall VoIP software application can show you the dropped call data including, originating number and whether it was a network or equipment failure." Now imagine you can see your calls in progress on a mobile app, take your dashboard where ever you go! "What is a lost call worth to you?"

12.) 
VOIPFUTURE GmbH.

Voipfuture Qrystal
Qrystal provides communication service providers, wholesalers, enterprises, call centers and cloud-based voice providers with unique, dual visibility monitoring capabilities for analysing both SIP and RTP packets.

Unlike other solutions, Qrystal provides visibility into both control and media plane. This way, you get the full picture of in-call user experience, all in one place.

Voipfuture’s patented technology automatically identifies typical impairment patterns, allowing you to reduce the time it takes to fix problems.

13.) 
Xdroid

Xdroid is an independent, privately-owned software development company. This enables us to respond to changes quickly.

Our Artificial Intelligence solution, based on deep expertise, reveals the truth about your customer interactions and will help you to communicate better.

Analytics knowledge is the backbone of our development team. Years of experience in developing high-tech software for contact centers of financial institutions, utility companies, telecom operators, etc., give us an incredible edge.

We help you to predict and anticipate in an uncertain and turbulent environment. Communicate better.
 

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