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Hosted Call Center Back-up Success

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

With the recent natural disasters that have ravaged the country, much talk in the telecommunications space has turned to business continuity and disaster recovery. Companies leveraging in-house solutions must have robust plans in place in the event of a disaster or interruption to business. With a hosted call center, however, business can immediately continue as usual.

This inContact blog explores the potential in the hosted call center as within this environment, disaster recovery and business continuity are really no-brainers. To stay operational, you simply need to be prepared. The hosted call center is already established for redundancy and offer colocations to store your data.

In an interview with San Diego’s 211’s Gabriel Kendall, inContact’s blogger gained a new perspective on what an organization may need in place to literally ride out the storm. Even with extensive planning – an organization can still be caught off guard.

San Diego 211 is a non-profit community and disaster hotline serving the San Diego community. The aforementioned interview took place one week after the nationally reported power outage. Ordinarily, San Diego 211 is ready for disasters, using inContact’s redundant and agile call center technology. They also have a number of back-up locations so calls can be re-routed when necessary. A back-up power generator is also in place – just in case.

The organization had done a lot of things right, but soon found out that they were easily caught off guard. After a recent move, the back-up generator was sitting in the parking lot – uninstalled. Those with the skills to handle disaster situations were out of the office and San Diego 211 was essentially a sitting duck.

As a result of its partnership with hosted call center provider, inContact, San Diego 211 had hope. The inContact dedicated service professional was closely monitoring the San Diego situation and instead of waiting for a call from San Diego 211, he reached out to the organization’s partners and back-ups.

Once communication was established, he wrote them a script in the dark and re-routed their hosted call center back-up location. San Diego 211 was soon up and running, taking calls again and helping the community in need.

“At some point, no matter how much you have prepared, your systems will fail.  All you will have going for you are the partnerships you have in place,” Gabriel Kendall, Community Development Officer, San Diego 211, told inContact. 

The hosted call center is truly only as good as the relationship and support provided by the vendor. In this case, inContact provided the one-on-one care necessary to ensure an organization affected by disaster could get back online and serve others.