Empirix Ensuring Successful Disaster Recovery for Contact Centers
October 30, 2008
By Tim Gray, TMCnet Web Editor
In business, disaster can take many forms. And when it strikes the most important test for any team is the effort they have put into preparing for such an event.
It is with that in mind that Empirix (News - Alert), a provider of voice application testing and monitoring solutions, presented a webinar this week titled: “If Disaster Strikes Tomorrow, Is Your Contact Center Ready to Respond?”
Jeff Weil, Empirix vice president of services and support, noted that most contact center’s only talk about business continuity and disaster recovery in the abstract.
“It is easy to say it won’t happen to you,” said Weil, who noted that many managers think because they don’t live in a hurricane zone or a tornado alley it won’t happen to them.
“Unfortunately disasters take many forms from lighting strikes to blown transformers and cut communications lines,” said Weil.
In fact, according to a recent benchmark study conducted by DMG Consulting and sponsored by Empirix, 36.7 percent of companies are confident that they can survive a disaster without seriously impacting their customers.
While disaster recovery planning is often broad in nature, it is a critical component in the operation of the systems that support the contact center. Weil says implementing a successful disaster recovery plan is critical to maintaining or reestablishing business operations in the event of a natural or man-made disaster, or other service disruption.
While 20 percent of contact centers do not have a disaster recovery or business continuity plan, andeven more concerning 60 percent of companies do not test their core servicing infrastructure, according to the study.
This lack of preparedness is putting enterprises at risk, and while an “act of God” is unavoidable having a solution in place can help limit the damage.
The webinar, which was also presented with Founder and President of DMG Consulting Donna Fluss, covered such topics as the approaches used by contact centers of all sizes to avoid and cope with disasters and best practices to minimize the chances of having a major service disruption in the contact center.
In addition, they discussed tactics for mitigating the impact of disasters on customers and how to transition to being a disaster recovery leader, well-prepared for any eventuality.
By implementing disaster recovery plans, said Weil, an organization can take measures like test backup systems to be sure customer calls will be handled properly and that self service and agent directed calls will be handled properly in the event that backup systems are needed.
Additionally, idle back up systems must be monitored constantly to make sure they are always capable of taking calls and ready for operation.
Below is a list of the Empirix Services Ensure Successful Disaster Recovery.
Empirix offers services to ensure the successful operation of the backup contact center infrastructure and applications. Disaster recovery testing scenarios include PBX (News - Alert) outage, IVR outage, routing database outage, call center outage, and full data center outage. By emulating volumes of real world callers and measuring their experience, testing will identify whether:
• Callers have trouble connecting to the backup equipment and/or site.
• Backup equipment/sites handle the burst of callers that call back immediately after a system failure.
• Callers experience longer response times connecting and navigating within the backup IVR.
Empirix can also monitor backup applications with Voice Watch to constantly ensure that if a failover occurs, the servers, systems, and applications will be available. Voice Watch automatically calls directly into the key backup applications emulating real customers to guarantee that an hour will not go by without a check on the availability of those systems and applications.
To listen to the complete webinar click here.
Tim Gray is a Web Editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Tim�s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Tim Gray