Reaching Peace of Mind with Cloud Contact Center Disaster Recovery

Disaster Recovery in the Contact Center

Business continuity involves more than just contact center disaster recovery. Resilience involves your entire business, from suppliers, to employees, to leadership. Your business needs:

• An internal communications plan; that is, a document that breaks down roles, priorities, and expectations in the event of a disaster.

• A leadership continuity plan that defines who steers the ship when the captain is away.

• Alternate supply chains, and an assessment of supply chain resilience. How likely are your suppliers to be affected by uncertainty? How will that impact your business? Do you have alternatives if one supplier fails to meet its agreement?

Perhaps most importantly (for a business committed to customer experience) you need a contact center disaster recovery plan. The contact center is the communications hub of your business; it’s the location into which all customer contacts are routed. If something goes wrong in the contact center, how do you preserve contact with customers? How would you let your customers know that something is wrong?

Design a Contact Center Business Continuity Plan

In the event of a disaster, such as a global pandemic, your contact center might go down. Either because you’ve had to evacuate the building, or because your customer communications solution can’t cope with the situation. This means that your agents will no longer be able to answer contacts, being separated from their interface and their desks. You need a way to place your contact center into disaster recovery mode remotely, via email or SMS.

• When the contact center goes down, sending a single SMS to a Disaster Recovery number will place the contact center into disaster recovery mode.

• This automatically enables a message, played to any customer who contacts you, informing them of the situation.

• Customers can then be redirected toward self-service options, or told to call back later. Customers whose calls are missed during the disaster can be flagged, so that agents can follow up once normal function is restored.

This might seem simple, but it goes a long way. Rather than being completely ignored, customers receive a compassionate message, reassuring them that they are heard and valued. This empathetic connection is of immense value and underpins great customer experience.

Most customers are sympathetic. If your contact center goes into disaster recovery mode, they’ll understand. A call-back later serves to follow up on their query, and to demonstrate how much they matter to your business.

Contact Center Disaster Recovery Boosts Scalability

If disaster strikes your business, it’s likely that your customers will learn about it sooner or later. And when they do, they’ll want to know whether the products and services you provide can still be counted on. Contact center disaster recovery, then, is a first step toward contact center scalability.

When disaster strikes, several things will happen very quickly:

• Your resources will be limited. Your contact center goes into disaster recovery mode, but this doesn’t mean the end of customer contact.

• Remote agents can be activated. Many agents across a host of sectors are already working remotely; in the event that your contact center is evacuated, all agents can work from home via a browser-based cloud CX solution.

• Demand will surge. Your customers will call up in droves to ensure that their purchases and ongoing services are secure. To meet this surge, you need a CX solution that can flex to meet any level of demand, provisioning new agents dynamically.

Contact center disaster recovery isn’t just about tackling individual disasters. It’s about creating a CX ecosystem that is prepared for all the effects of uncertainty, and that can continue to provide outstanding customer contact at the same time.

Resilient CX Begins with Contact Center Disaster Recovery

Contact center disaster recovery is an essential piece of functionality, but it’s only the first step toward resilient CX. Your contact center also needs availability, scalability, integrations, and flexibility.

• Availability – can your customer still get in contact, even with your contact center in disaster recovery mode? Are remote agents on hand to take calls when the contact center is unable to?

• Scalability – when demand surges, can your contact center solution handle it? Can you provision new agents at a moment’s notice, flexing to meet any level of demand?

• Integrations – during periods of peak demand, can your agents still deliver personalized experiences? Agents must be equipped with customer data during interactions, and this necessitates flexible integrations that break down data siloes.

• Flexibility – effective disaster recovery begins with flexibility. Can you adapt to a changing technological landscape, to ensure that you’re always meeting customer expectations? Can you add new services and technologies as and when you need them so that you only pay for what you actually use?

These are the key attributes of resilient CX, and effective contact center disaster recovery depends on each of them.

Resilient CX Depends on a Reliable Partner

Resilient CX doesn’t stop with the contact center. It carries down through your whole supply chain. If one link is knocked out, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. The best way to support your contact center disaster recovery solution is to make every link in the chain as strong as possible.

Your cloud CX solution is no exception. Size is no guarantee of stability. A reliable cloud CX partner has a number of essential features:

• For maximum reliability, you should do business with a private cloud provider. These providers own their own cloud infrastructure, so they have full control in the event of an outage, and offer a single point of contact for support.

• Your CX provider should maintain a full library of integrations. This should be updated regularly, to prevent reliance on less reliable third-party integrations.

• The best providers will offer a modular model, letting you customize your CX solution according to your needs, adding new technologies where necessary, and paying only for what your actually use.

When it comes to contact center disaster recovery, your provider is as important as the product. Picking the right provider makes resilient CX easy.