Contact Center Quality Management Featured Article

In today's environment, virtually every business and organization has a digital presence that allows them to interact with their customers. If this digital presence is somehow disrupted it can result in a large amount of monetary loss as customers find another business or delay the purchase of a product or service. It is therefore extremely important to ensure multiple redundant systems are put in place to maintain operational continuity no matter what happens. On Monday, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power experienced an incident which caused a disruption to its customer service operations because even the backup system failed.

According to an article in The Los Angeles Times, the LADWP experienced the disruption because of a “chiller”, which is responsible for cooling down the computer systems of the department, failed.

When the outage took place at around 5:45 p.m. the department's customer call center had limited capability to help customers, and the personal call-back feature as well as the website was down.

Later on that evening the LADWP Tweeted this message, " Chiller is fixed and IT sys' incl phone, online bill pay and http://LADWP.com  r coming back online. Thx for your patience this evening."

Even though the LADWP is one of the largest utility companies in the world, the primary and backup cooling systems it was using went down at the same time. What this incident points out is, if something can go wrong, it can definitely go wrong; and in the digital world we all live in, enough contingency controls have to be put in place to ensure critical infrastructure have adequate protection.

This means routinely testing backup systems at the site as well as deploying remote sites that are able to continue operations in the event there is complete failure.

Taking this type of precaution also applies to individuals in their homes. As more people rely on their computers and Internet connection for home businesses, remote working as well as entertainment and information, they have to install surge protectors, UPS batteries and routinely back up computers. Taking these precautionary measures doesn't guarantee 100 percent protection, but it gives you better odds than not doing so.