There are many scenarios where your contact centre could be impacted by an emergency: weather, natural disasters, fires, epidemics, along with computer and human failure.
Disasters and technology failure can come without warning, and this can be detrimental to your contact centre, resulting in a lot of downtime, excessive wait times and a drop in customer satisfaction.
According to Plan B, a medium sized business is expected to lose up to £45,000 per hour during system downtime, with the average recovery time being 30 hours.
Just think about the impact it would have if your contact centre was non-operational because of either a natural disaster or technological failure:
– Customers would be unable to contact you
– Your workforce may not be able to get into the office
– Your office space might be inaccessible
– Your call volume may increase and your system would not be able to cope
– You may lose access to helpdesk
– Your brand reputation will be impacted
– You might have to spend money on new equipment
This is why it is so important that your contact centre is prepared in the event of an emergency with a fit for purpose disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Within the plan, you need to have different responses for different circumstances e.g. if it is hardware failure, do you have a back-up solution where calls can be re-routed and handled? If there is a flood that impacts your office space, is there a way to route calls elsewhere? If your workforce are hit by an illness, do you have external resources on hand?
When it comes to your disaster recovery plan, putting it together is only a small part of making it successful. It is also important to train agents and supervisors on the process, provide written instructions of the disaster recovery procedures, and test it at least 1-2 times a year. By ensuring everyone in the contact centre knows their responsibilities, you’ll be prepared in the event of an emergency, and minimise the chance of disappointing your customers.
At MPL Contact, we offer a range of outsourced contact centre solutions on a 24 hours a day, 365 days a year basis, delivering highly cost-effective quality contact handling services and crisis support for unplanned incidents. We are already relied on by many top brands in the UK as part of their disaster recovery procedures, and we have our own tried and tested disaster recovery plans in place, to increase reliability and give you peace of mind.