In last month’s
article written for Call Centre Helper’s Newsletter,
the first of a series of five that I have been asked
to write on the subject of disaster recovery and/or
business continuity planning for call centres, I
endeavoured to explain why it is imperative that
Call Centre operators give serious consideration
to the adoption of both disaster recovery and business
continuity plans. The final paragraph of that article
touched on the question of what would happen if an
inbound call centre lost its telecommunications suggesting
that this would probably constitute a Call Centre
Manager’s worst nightmare.
Why? Because every inbound and/or outbound call centre
is heavily, if not totally reliant, upon receiving
and/or making telephone calls! And while there is
a gradual migration towards the adoption of Contact
Centres where a call centre’s customers can
also contact the Agent via email, SMS Text and the
like (media which, it should be remembered, also
use the telephone network, either fixed line or mobile
for their transmission), the vast majority of contacts
made into/from a call centre rely on voice calls – using
the telephone.
So just stop and think for a moment and, using the “Five
Key Questions” attached to this article, consider
what would happen if your Call Centre was unable
to receive calls from, and/or make calls to, your
customer base or, perhaps your customer’s customer
base (if you are operating an outsourced call centre)
as a result of a cut telephone cable, ACD/PBX failure
of loss of your call centre building for any one
of a number of reasons highlighted in my previous
article. In this increasingly competitive world the
ramifications of adverse effects on brand and reputation
of lost communications will be huge, with outsourced
call centres defaulting on of their closely monitored
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Performance Targets.
So what can be done to mitigate the risks of a failed
telecommunications infrastructure or loss of a building?
There will be those of you that will argue that because
you have another one/two/three/four etc call centres
within your organisation you can simply re-route
your incoming calls to those call centres to have
the calls answered as seamlessly as they were before.
However, I rarely see call centres operating at 50%/33%25%
capacity on the off chance that spare capacity may
be required to take calls from a failed call centre.
In fact most, if not all, Call Centres work at as
close to capacity as they can – and sometimes
at even greater than 100% using call queuing and
Agent “call back” software to generate
even greater efficiencies. The simple answer is that
even if you did have multiple call centres – and
most call centre businesses to not – it would
be wise to plan to recover the failed call centre
without also severely disrupting other call centres
in the group.
Another solution might be to retain the services
of a Recovery Site Provider, reserving space, on
either a dedicated or syndicated/shared basis in
one of their fully equipped buildings. This is certainly
an option – but one that will be extremely
expensive if you intend re-locating any more than
a limited number (invariably 25-40%) of your Agents
to continue to business operations following the
outage, which begs the question, what will the other
60-75% of you Agents be doing until normal service
is resumed in a day? a few days? a week? longer?
However, if you are going to consider the adoption
of a recovery site for, say, 25% of your Agents,
and simply plan to maintain a basic service should
you suffer an outage, you need to give very careful
thought to how you might implement this option as
whilst there are a growing number of recovery sites
becoming available, they are invariably located near
to the major conurbations – and do involve
a certain amount of additional travelling to and
from the nearest/selected recovery site. Accordingly
not all Agents will be able to relocate to an alternative
call centre environment. Prior family commitments
of collecting the children from school, looking after
ageing parents, or simply requiring a flexible working
environment is not conducive to working in an alternative
location some distance away from their normal place
of work.
There is also an argument that the use of Non-Geographic
numbers (0800s; 0870s; 0845s) enables call centre
operators to quickly, and relatively easily, re-route
incoming calls directed to specific 08XX “service
numbers” to alternative specific geographic
numbers anywhere (contrary to popular belief, it
is simply not possible to re-route a non-geographic
number to another non-geographic number as the Network
Operators currently do not allow this). So….
on the face of it, we have a solution. But, in reality,
call centre Agents rarely work in only one service.
Using “full skills based routing” functionality
with in the ACD/PBX, Agents are able to take calls
from multiple services based upon different priorities
and skills require to answer the specific call – which
really cancels out the benefits of being able to
re-route these service numbers anywhere as the call
centre Agent, allocated to answer incoming calls
to these respective services can only be in one location
at anyone time – but where will that Agent
have re-located to.
So what is the answer to the problem of delivering “always
on” telecommunications to our mission critical
call centres?
In the era of 365x24x7 call centres, call queuing,
power diallers and the like, where ever greater efficiencies
are being sought to maximise call centre profitability,
where brand protection and deliverance of stringent
SLAs is paramount, what is really needed, in order
to provide the ultimate in business continuity planning,
is a solution which delivers a more flexible way
of working on an “all day - every day” basis
enabling call centre Agents to work literally at
any time and from anywhere.
The philosophy surrounding remote/homeworking is
certainly not new. In fact one of the great exponents
of flexible/home working, David Speakman of Travel
Councellors, an on-line travel agency, established
such a “virtual call centre” as far back
as 1998. Now, some eight year later, the concept
is now well proven, allowing Call Centre Agents to
work just as seamlessly from home, or at the very
least, closer to home, than from within a conventional
call centre.
How flexible home/remote working can be used to,
not only provide a comprehensive disaster recovery
and/or business continuity solution, as well as grow
your call centre business will be addressed in next
month’s article.
Five Key Questions to ask yourself when considering
the need for telecoms continuity.
What would happen to our Call Centre business
if our existing customers or, more importantly potential
new customers could not contact us over the telephone?
How much money would our business lose if
our customers, or our customer’s customers
could not talk to call us for an hour?... half a
day?...a day?... or even a whole week?
What impact would the loss of our incoming
calls from our customers, or our customer’s
customers have on our brand and perception of our
company in the market place?
If our customers, or customer’s customers,
could not speak to us on the telephone, would they
approach our competitors and place orders with them?
And if they did….would they return to our company
once our telecommunications infrastructure had been
restored?
Have we really thought through the implications
to our business of any or all of the above adversely
effecting our company?
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