Providing Business Continuity for Contact Centers – Part One

When a business uses a traditional, on-premise contact center, there can be logistical challenges. These solutions depend on customer service representatives being physically present in an office location. Unfortunately, many unforeseen events can hinder that in-person attendance.

Challenges that Prevent Reaching the Office

There are multiple reasons why contact center representatives cannot reach their post.  Severe weather events—such as icy roads that make driving unsafe, or thunderstorms that flood streets and highways—a sudden halt to public transit, or, as recent events have shown, national and local stay-at-home ordinances due to a global pandemic can prevent service representatives from being able to work in the office.

Unfortunately for businesses, the same conditions that prevent employees from getting to the office can often cause an increase in demand for customer support. Sudden weather events can overload utility and other service providers. Problems with transportation companies can inundate a contact center with calls from frantic customers. And recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on support requests:

• Remote work and learning companies +216%
• Airlines +199%
• Grocers +39%
• Zendesk +20%

Challenges that Prevent Working in the Office

Physical challenges can continue even when service representatives reach the office. Buildings may lose power, networks can have outages, and on-premise contact center hardware can fail. Other emergencies, such as fires, can result in a full stop of work.

Many of these challenges are not limited to on-premise systems. Physical office failures can impact even the most reliable cloud-hosted solutions if the employees are working together in the same location. When the office goes offline, so does access to the contact center.

Considering that customer calls do not merely stop just because the business has issues, it is critical to use a contact center solution that can provide business continuity. The next blog post in this series will look at a few options that can help ensure operations are not interrupted when the unexpected happens.

Learn more about how to ensure business continuity for customer service at https://www.mavenir.com/contact-us/.