Keeping your contact centre safe

For many businesses - perhaps even most businesses - the contact centre has become absolutely critical. Contact centres are the channel through which a business interacts with customers, but also suppliers and other members of the value chain. And as contact centre technology has become more sophisticated and more deeply integrated into the corporate back-end systems, the contact centre itself becomes truly the nerve centre of the business.

But despite this growing importance, many companies do not pay sufficient attention to protecting themselves against a catastrophic event that puts their contact centres out of commission.

The threats are real. At the most dramatic level, we only have to think back to the Al Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers. Many lives were lost, but so was a lot of corporate data. It is good practice to have your data recovery data centre located somewhere not on your own premises.

Natural disasters like the tsunamis in South East Asia and Japan also point to the need to make better preparations for natural disasters. We are told that the frequency and scale of these types of events is likely to increase as a result of global warming.

There are of course many lower levels of risk that, nonetheless, could put your contact centre out of action for a period of time. Contact centres can also be affected by a significant change in the technology or telecommunications environment, major changes to corporate business processes and large staff changes. Of course, changes in the way the contact centre and its business continuity solution are supported can also cause instabilities.

In order to mitigate the real risks that contact centres face, most companies have some sort of disaster recovery plan in place - but what they forget is the business continuity element. Disaster recovery plans are typically focused on getting the technology up and running, but business continuity takes a look at how to keep the business as a whole running. To do that, it's necessary to understand how the business processes themselves would be affected.

The first step is to perform a business impact analysis in order to quantify just what the impact of the contact centre going down would be, and which elements are critical. As part of this process, the company needs to consider the maximum period that the centre may be down before overall organisational viability is affected, and the point to which information must be restored to allow operations to recommence.

It's vital to build an understanding of the business continuity management life cycle. It begins, as noted, with an understanding of the organisation and continues with crafting an appropriate business continuity strategy. Thereafter, one must, of course, develop and implement the appropriate responses as indicated in the strategy.

The final and critical element is that the business continuity plan must be reviewed and tested regularly. This should be done at least twice a year, as a rule. Simulation exercises can be used, but there must also be procedures in place for moving staff to the disaster recovery location - whether it be by plane or vehicle, or even, in Gauteng, by the Gautrain. These plans need to be regularly tested to make sure they work in practice.

This cycle must then be repeated after each review is complete. In this way, business continuity management becomes embedded into the corporate culture - and your contact centre has the appropriate level of protection to ensure that a catastrophe doesn't derail your business.