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Are You Ready? Call Center Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategies

Are You Ready? Call Center Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategies

September 09, 2013
By Michael Guta, Contributing Writer

In today's business environment, businesses have to implement contingency plans to ensure that assets are protected from many different forms of possible disaster scenarios. Whether it is a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), a natural disaster, fire or any of the unforeseen incidents that can bring operations to a standstill, organizations have to plan ahead for a potential disruption so they can get back on track as quickly as possible. The right business continuity and disaster recovery strategy is essential for many different parts of the organization including the call center.


A recent Market Insight report by Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) titled “Confronting the Unpredictable in the World of Customer Contact: Strategies for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery”, highlights the importance of having the right strategy in place for contact centers, because oftentimes it is the resource customers rely on in times of disaster.

A business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan is designed to protect the organization in the event of a disruption. These plans have to be implemented before a disaster takes place to reduce the impact if and when an event takes place. Moving the organization toward recovery and continuity as soon as possible lets customers and business partners know the products and services they rely on will be available no matter what happens.

"The importance of information during times of such distress has made a strong case for advanced and multilayered business continuity and disaster recovery methods. This enables contact centers to plan, respond and recover from natural and man-made disasters," said Frost & Sullivan Information and Communication Technologies Industry Analyst Brendan Read.

An effective strategy includes a risk assessment and business impact analysis followed by documenting the disaster recovery plan. Once this has been accomplished the plan has to be tested by training employees with the responsibility and procedure that has been assigned to each individual. A key component of this implementation is regular training of these procedures so the plan becomes second nature to all the parties involved in the BC/DR.

With only 4.7 percent of firms testing their disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plans monthly, the remaining 95.3 percent face challenges they can easily avoid if they choose to apply what has been proven to work.

The report goes on to say the best disaster recovery solutions will be those that minimize capital investment and operational costs and instead rely on supporting customers, employees, and operations.

The plan should not exclude any possible resources that can be exploited to minimize the damage and maximize the recovery rate, which includes: allowing employees to work from home, using class technology to store valuable information, applying multiple redundant systems, contacting customers proactively, inbound and outbound interactive voice response (IVR) and SMS/text, multi-shoring the services, active-active server backup, geo-redundancy, and onsite generators.




Edited by Rory J. Thompson



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