Keeping your contact centre safe - All VoIP News

Business continuity plans have to go beyond traditional IT disaster recovery, says Rudy Sutton, Solutions Design, ContinuitySA.

The contact centre has become thoroughly critical

For many businesses - maybe even most businesses - the contact centre has become thoroughly critical. Contact centres are the channel through which a business interacts with clients, nevertheless also suppliers and other members of the value chain. And as contact centre research has become more sophisticated and more deeply integrated into the corporate back-end systems, the contact centre itself becomes in fact the nerve centre of the business.

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

The real risks that contact centres face

In order to mitigate the real risks that contact centres face, most companies have some sort of disaster recovery plan in place - nevertheless what they forget is the business continuity element. Disaster recovery plans are typically focused on getting the research up and running, yet business continuity takes a look at how to keep the business in its entirety 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 components are critical. As part of this process, the company needs to consider the maximum period that the centre may be down previously 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, clearly, 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 for the time being twice a year, on the whole. Simulation exercises can be used, however there must as well 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 at the time be repeated afterwards each review is complete. Thus, 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.

ContinuitySA is Africa's leading provider of business continuity management and related services. The company boasts some of the continent's most highly skilled and qualified business continuity and disaster management experts who help companies, organisations and government departments of all sizes prepare for and deal with all eventualities. These include potential threats, events, incidences and unforeseen or sudden disruptions due to human error or natural events.

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