The 2010 hurricane season has officially begun, with the first named storm, Hurricane Alex, projected to slam into northern Mexico late Wednesday; warnings have also been posted for the south Texas coast. There are projections are for more hurricanes like Alex but hopefully none like Hurricane Katrina that devastated the Southeast five years ago.
Contact centers are on the front lines of disasters in more ways than one. Not only can they be ripped apart, flooded, thrown into darkness and disconnected, and staff evacuated, but they also provide vital services. Contact centers need to keep going to support their enterprises.
Employing off-site hosted applications is one strategy that contact centers can adopt to withstand and recover from these horrible and costly events as it avoids losing valuable software while enabling them to provide seamless service to customers from staffers' homes and from temporary locations.
Contactual is a leading provider of cloud-based contact center software. TMCnet recently interviewed Kimberly Odom, Senior Director of Marketing, to get the company's insights on contact center disaster planning and response, and how its services can help.
TMCnet: What are the most common and/or costly disaster threats faced by contact centers?
Kimberly Odom: Any situation that disrupts contact center operations for extended periods of time has a dramatic, negative impact on an organization. Most often people think about natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding and blizzards as these are cases where facilities and/or communication lines are compromised. Equally important to consider are pandemics, situations that impact primary transportation corridors (anyone remember the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis?), and similar events that would prevent agents from coming into the center.
TMCnet: What are the pros and cons of hosted versus premises-licensed software with regards to disaster planning, survivability and recovery?
KO: Hosted solutions, particularly those delivered via a SaaS (News - Alert) model are better equipped to allow organizations to maintain operations in the event of a disaster. These applications are typically hosted in tier 1 data centers with fully redundant components, so in effect business continuity is built-in to the solution. These solutions also do an excellent job of supporting remote and home-based agents without the need for additional equipment investment.
On-premises solutions are extremely costly and time-consuming to duplicate and maintain, and typically require specialized hardware and software to support agents working remotely. Oftentimes organizations do not have the resources to duplicate their premises-based infrastructure and while they may have a back-up call center provided by an outsourcer that can be utilized in case of a disaster, the interaction flows and systems being used are different which hampers recovery efforts.
TMCnet: Outline the features of Contactual's (News - Alert) hosted platform, including your back end to enable your servers to withstand disasters, which improve contact center business continuity
KO: Contactual's Advanced Virtual Tenant Architecture (AVTA) is truly unique in the hosted contact center space. The multi-platform, fully redundant architecture is deployed in five data centers around the world. Tenants are virtualized, so they are not tied to any particular server, and assigned a primary and backup platform. If there is a need to switch platforms recovery time is less than one minute; the customer's configuration data, prompts, recording, historical data and all other aspects of the contact center are preserved.
In addition, our solution makes it easy for agents to work from any location. Our Agent Desktop is 100 percent web-based and firewall friendly, with no plug-ins or downloads to configure and no special equipment required at the agent's location. Last year a blizzard in northern Canada threatened the operations of one of our largest customers as their agents would not be able to come in to the center. The customer instructed all of their agents to work from home and as a result there was no impact to operations, service levels were met and it was business as usual despite a snowstorm that brought the region to a standstill.