Contact centers have been at the core of disaster-recovery plans for years – but only recently have they come into the forefront of IT planning. Because of the prevalence of recent headline-news disasters – namely Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the H1N1 epidemic – as well as the development of advanced technology, the contact center has become much more resilient in times of crisis.

 

Earlier this month, communications giant Nortel hosted a webinar on the role of communications technology planning and disaster recovery for contact centers.

 

In a two-part Q&A series, Natalie Keightley, a webinar host and the global product marketing leader for Nortel’s (News - Alert) customer contact solutions, spoke about the importance of contact center planning. The second half of her interview, Keightley gave more insight on how communications technology can mitigate the impact of a disruption on the operations of a contact center. 

The exchange follows. 

NK: There are five key areas that communications solutions can support in times of crisis:

1. They provide secure remote working for employees and contact center agents.

2. They enable continuing workforce communications and collaboration.

3. They provide rapid and meaningful notification to customers, citizens, employees and partners.

4. They ensure resilient and flexible contact center operations that adapt to changing conditions such as flexible call routing or hosted contact center operations.

5. They can support critical training and knowledge transfer during these times (e.g. knowledge bases, training pop-ups).

In addition, solutions providers like Nortel's Enterprise Services organization can help businesses and organizations create comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plans

NK: For the contact center Nortel offers solutions such as Off Site Agent, and Virtual Contact Center that allow agents to work offsite while still permitting supervisors to access essential statistics on agent activity and operational efficiency. In addition, Nortel's contact centers can be networked across geographies to ensure that the workload at one site can be shared across other locations should a localized disaster occur. Nortel's Notification suite of solutions offers a host of options to provide rapid and meaningful outreach to a business's or organization's constituents. Solutions like Hot Desking, Secure Portable Office and Unified Messaging keep employees productive regardless of their location. Finally, Telepresence (News - Alert) and Multimedia conferencing solutions provide effective and interactive collaboration solutions that improve communications flow and decision making under crisis conditions. 

NK: Nortel also has a set of services offerings that help customers assess, plan, design, implement and test these business continuity solutions, ensuring the systems are running properly and as designed. Not only that, but Nortel offers a variety of hosted/Software as a Service-based contact center offerings for normal business operations and for contingency purposes. Nortel’s hosted contact center offering can provide a high-availability and fully resilient back-up and contingency site.