Customer support is a mission-critical activity, and not having access to this function even for a day could significantly damage your business. Even for outbound, the function is tightly coupled with sales and profitability, and a prolonged downtime will impact the bottom line. That’s why it is so important to prepare for disasters (organisational or natural) that could disturb BAU for your contact centre.
What Disasters Should You Plan For?
Your contact centre could be temporarily unavailable due to a number of reasons.
- Localised causes – Natural disasters, disruption in public transport, civil disorders, such as a riot, and other events could cause downtime in a specific location
- Infrastructure causes – System failures due to a power outage, a cybersecurity attack, a data leak, network issues, and the like cripple the infrastructure powering your contact centre
- Organisational causes – Adverse events occurring within the organisation like a workplace accident or a fire can hinder your ability to stay productive
- Unprecedented acts of god – Large scale events like an economic recession or a pandemic can drive-up beyond capacity, causing bottlenecks and eventually downtime
Your business continuity and disaster recovery plan should factor in all of these possibilities.
Tactics for Preparing for the Next Disaster
When you prep for a worst-case scenario in a contact centre, there are two things to keep in mind: response and prevention. If your contact centre goes down, a response mechanism should kick in to mitigate the damage as much as possible, even as your work on resuming the services. The prevention aspect minimises the possibility of an adverse event happening in the first place.
- Disaster response: The first step when responding to a disaster that causes contact centre downtime, is informing the necessary stakeholders. Speak with your organisational leaders, local regulatory body, first responding team, and the customer to let all your stakeholders what is happening in a transparent manner. If you have a back-up in place, move your agents to these secondary systems at the earliest
- Disaster prevention: There are two aspects to disaster prevention: system maintenance so that you don’t face infrastructure-related events and business resilience, imbibing the flexibility to adapt without disturbing BAU
- Maintenance: This covers essential utilities such as power supply, electrical infrastructure, hardware, employee amenities – all the tangible elements of a contact centre that keep it running. To build business resilience, you can transfer contact centre systems to the cloud, adopt flexible working, cross-skill agents so they can offset labour shortages, and establish a remote centre that works independently of the primary hub
The Importance of Technology in Disaster Planning
Today, technology plays a massive role in ensuring that a resilient, risk-proof contact centre, immune to the majority of disasters – or at least minimising your risk exposure in case of your worst-case scenario. A cloud-based system lets agents login from any location, without relying on localised infrastructure that is open to disasters. Cybersecurity measures are also important, protecting customer information from external threats and internal vulnerabilities that could cause highly damaging attacks.
