Keeping the contact centre - and business - up and running

Love them or hate them, contact centres have grown steadily in importance. Now, for many businesses across all sectors, the contact centre has become the conduit through which clients and business partners interface with the company. In line with their growing importance and thus scope, they have become complex organisations in their own right.

All of this, of course, represents a real risk. In the event of a disaster, how quickly can the contact centre be recovered? And how much of it can be made operational? In certain industries - think of a bank - transactions are extremely time-sensitive. For others, there is greater leeway, but it must always be borne in mind that today's customers are both fickle and have realised the power of social media to voice their dissatisfaction. One person's inability to get in touch with your company to do business can quickly escalate into a firestorm on Twitter or Facebook.

The inescapable fact is that companies need to understand exactly what the components of their contact centre/s are, and have an integrated business continuity plan that can get them up and running in as short a time as possible, says Justin Hammann, business development manager at ContinuitySA.

A good place to start is to understand the main things that could go wrong. These include pandemics that affect staff and the inability to access the premises owing, say, to a fire in the neighbourhood or a bomb scare. In South Africa, cable theft that causes either communication or power outages is a real possibility. But by far the most common threat is, of course, ICT failure of one sort or another.

Next, a company really needs to understand the various components that make up its contact centre. At ContinuitySA, we have created a conceptual model, or stack, that makes a logical framework to follow (see the diagram). The stack builds from the bottom, and the business continuity plans must encompass them all.

Creating these plans can never be a single event - contact centres are extremely dynamic environments with new technology and capabilities being added all the time. For example, a company might introduce a promotion that requires it to receive and respond to SMSes from existing and potential customers. If the centre goes down during this promotion, that capability needs to be integrated into the business continuity plans.

For this reason, we suggest following the typical business continuity management life cycle approach. Without going into details about the life cycle itself, the important point is that the process is iterative and measurable. It ultimately comes down to embedding business continuity management into the corporate culture: this is something that senior management has to lead.

The life cycle approach will also prevent a company from excessive focus on one element of its contact centre - usually technology - to the detriment of other components. It means that the plans made are not focused on scenarios (like floods or IT failure) but on the resources needed to run the centre.

Over many years in the business, we have distilled several key lessons that should guide your thinking about how to plan for the continuity of your contact centre.

* Understand the importance the contact centre has to your business and thus the impact of any disaster. This will help you achieve focus and set budgets realistically.

* We have found it very beneficial to involve all the role-players involved in each component of the stack, as well as the business, in order to make accountability clear.

* Transparency, in general, is crucial. Without it, one often finds that the business has completely unrealistic expectations of the business continuity plan, and the business continuity team does not properly communicate areas of concern for attention.

* Testing is absolutely vital. It must be meaningful - too often, companies test what they know they can do - and it must be documented so that issues can be addressed and the necessary budgeting undertaken as required.

In conclusion, contact centres have become very complex and very important. It's vital to understand how important, and what elements actually go into the centre - and then create the plan you need to ensure continuity.