Author:  Roger Sumner

Hurricane season is here and once again, the high likelihood of above-normal activity is predicted.  I’ve seen it time and time again where customers think they have an adequate disaster recovery plan in place, but it hasn’t been tested for years or hasn’t been updated in some time.  Whenever I’m out at customer sites, I try to stress the importance of a well-planned and regularly tested plan.

All too often, I see contact centers that assume their overarching corporate disaster recovery plan includes details specific to their departments.  I hate to say that this is not always the case.  I am a strong advocate of checking-in with the keeper of your company’s overall plan to make sure you’ve got your bases covered before a hurricane or other natural disaster occurs.  The questions below are some of the common things you should consider when determining if you’ve got the right systems and processes in place to sustain your business in the event of a crisis.  If you can’t address these with your current plan, you should make some immediate changes.

• How much budget have you set aside to ensure some level of  business continuity?
• Will your systems still operate in the event of a disaster? 
• Have you built in enough redundancy in your systems to ensure immediate failover to an unaffected location, with uninterrupted or only slightly interrupted service?
• Are your agents spread out or in one geographic location?  For example, do you have back-up agents that could handle an outage if one area is hit hard (maybe this is where an outsourcer comes into play)? 
• If your contact centers are maxed out by the disaster, do you have a contingency plan in place that will enable other functions/departments to step in to support telephone inquiries?  These plans should include technology, training and scripting for back-up agents.
• Who is responsible, and what steps will be taken to assess post-hurricane damage and repair systems?
• Can your service provider help establish back architecture?
• Do you understand the lead time for replacement parts and systems for complete disaster?
• Do you test your plan at some level at regular intervals? 

This sounds daunting, I know.  But a little up-front planning and a lot of up-front communication can go a long way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 6:44 am and is filed under Disaster Recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.