Avoid Natural Disasters Sinking Your Contact Center

One doesn't need to look far to find natural disasters -- just look at the floods in Queensland, Australia today. Floods, fires, earthquakes, you name it, we've got it. And if you live in Southern California, well, you get the mud slide special as well.

"While modern enterprises face the same threats as our ancestors, they no longer need respond by building an ark and stuffing it with two servers, two routers, two operating systems, two of every type of equipment, needed to keep your business afloat," writes the Contactual (News - Alert) blog in one of the more clever industry-generated lines of recent vintage.

All the more clever for being? a comfortably accurate depiction of the prevailing attitude.?

"?Traditional call center disaster recovery systems face three primary considerations," Contactual officials say: "IT systems, staff, and facilities. The old way of DR planning took immense planning and coordination. It demanded perfect execution at precisely the moment perfect execution was least likely to happen. How could it? You’re in the middle of a disaster!"

It’s not called a call center for nothing, the blog says, with the emphasis on “center. It's the heart of your customer-facing operations. If your call center happens to be at the center of the disaster and your facility is inaccessible, you’re sunk."

As Contactual officials say, this is an argument for a a hosted contact center. "Disaster recovery and business continuity are part of the package. With a virtual call center model, the three hurdles of staff, facility and systems are ancient history."

System failures? "Your contact center host has all the redundancies engineered into the offering, complete with a failover center safely tucked away in another part of country. Y?our facility is virtual," so staff access being delayed due to a natural disaster isn't a consideration, either. Although one does wonder where the server farms are if they're in places impervious to natural disasters, and how much a house in that neighborhood would cost.

 

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Chris DiMarco