Business continuity and disaster recovery in customer services
For most larger companies, the contact center / call centre is a critical business system. These checklists, prepared by Roger Sumner, senior vice president of the Technology Office at Aspect Software, will help ensure that you ask the correct questions when planning for business continuity in this area. First acknowledge that the term ‘disaster’ encompasses a lot of unpleasant possibilities. Get specific about the types of problems your contact center might face: - Facility disaster - the building is damaged - Facility downtime - power is cut from the facility or personnel cannot get to the facility - Component disaster/downtime - one or more hardware components within a facility are destroyed or disabled - Application disaster/downtime - one or more software applications residing on hardware within the facility are destroyed or disabled - Data disaster - data is corrupted or lost - Network disaster - data networks are compromised or disabled - Security disaster - company security for internal information is breeched and data is destroyed or modified. A comprehensive disaster recovery plan needs to encompass processes and solutions that will address each type of potential problem. Ask the right technology questions 1. Is the system redundant within itself? Does it have redundant internal workings? 2. Is full redundancy required in a disaster situation? 3. Can you run two systems, one primary and one backup, in two different locations? 4. Can each of the systems - same location or not - be configured to handle the load for all transactions if one fails? 5. Would the two systems share the load under normal operation? 6. Does the system have a hot or cold standby if redundant concurrent systems are not desired/required? 7. Does the hot standby system - a system that runs simultaneously with the primary system and is mirrored in real-time - automatically start in the case of failure, or is manual intervention required? 8. Can the cold standby system - a system that is only called upon when primary technology fails and has regularly scheduled data backups -automatically/remotely be started in case of failure, or is manual intervention required? Build people and processes into the plan - Do your contact center employees know what to do if business continuity is interrupted? - Do they know where they should go to work, or if they have access to hosted applications that allow them to access contact center applications remotely from undamaged locations? - Are self-service applications required to free up agent resources for critical matters? - Is someone charged with ensuring that your self-service options are automatically updated? - Are scripting applications in place, and up to date, to allow for uniform customer service in case agents have to temporarily take on unfamiliar roles, and have agents been made aware of this possibility? - Are customer relationship management applications in place, and up-to-date, that will allow access to uniform customer information, and have the agents been trained to use the applications? Assistance in developing a contact center disaster recovery plan can be found with most contact center solutions vendors. They can provide guidance on how to manage redundancy or failover and recovery processes with your existing contact center technology, as well as help your organization document and categorize all of the contact centers and services your organization provides and determine the impact a disruption will have on those systems. Specifically, they can look at the cost of redundancy and fail-safe systems versus the mission critical value of your centers. Naturally, some companies' centers are not as mission critical as others, so each company needs to decide if the cost has a valid return on investment. They can also make recommendations regarding redundancy on each system, based on the suggested levels of recovery and the requirements around each of those systems. In many cases, extra components or software may not be required because the existing component is covered under the recovery plans for hardware and/or software that the contact center already has in place. This can be determined during the discovery process. The contact center should also be sure to coordinate its disaster recovery plans with the rest of the organization. There may be some overlap, and it is important not to assume that another area of the business is taking care of supporting the systems that overlap with the contact center. Also, if you are outsourcing any portion of your contact center initiatives, you must be sure that the outsourcer vendor has its own recovery plans in place. Sarbanes-Oxley, in the United States, requires organizations to provide evidence of business continuity plans and this includes vendor-provided services as well, including outsourced services. The best disaster recovery plan is worthless if it isn't updated continually and tested regularly. All too often, call centers invest large amounts of time, money, and other resources into developing a plan but make the mistake of ignoring the maintenance required to keep the plan effective and efficient. The financial impact of relying on an untested or outdated plan can be devastating. Natural and technological disasters can be business disasters as well - but they don't have to be. Businesses that proactively select and implement the appropriate disaster-recovery technologies and processes can keep disruptions in customer service to a minimum and keep revenue flowing in spite of unfortunate events.
•Date: 16th June 2006 • Region: US/World • Type: Article •Topic: Telecoms continuity |
