Author:  Roger Sumner

Nearly every day when I read the newspaper, listen to the radio, or turn on the television, I see something about the “Bird Flu.”  I haven’t yet started building and stocking my own personal bunker, but I am strongly recommending that our customers think about and plan for the possibility of a pandemic threat.  In particular, you should consider how your company would continue serving your customers during a time of unusually high absenteeism. 

Pretend you are contact center manager for an insurance company.  The Bird Flu strikes and your incoming call volume spikes as customers attempt to make sure they are covered for an emergency room visit or check on the status of a claim.

Unfortunately, many of your agents called in sick and you don’t have enough people to provide back-up. The few agents who are manning your phones are stressed out, and your customers are getting more and more anxious.  What should you do?

A speech self-service system would be a very viable option in a situation like this.  During a pandemic, your customers (and agents) might be a bit frazzled and have difficulty finding letters and numbers on their telephone keypads. The ability to “talk” to an automated system and have it “talk” back would empower your customers to quickly and intuitively fulfill their own needs.  You could even take this one step further and integrate your speech self-service application with a customer relationship management (CRM) system to provide truly personalized interactions.

Another option would be to use your VoIP solution.  Its offers the flexibility of allowing your agents to work from home, enabling them to continue their customer service without putting themselves at risk.  And, your customers would never know the difference.  Obviously, this would require some pre-planning to ensure your agents have the infrastructure in place to easily transition to working from home.

You could also provide chat capability to agents who are at home.  This would deliver the same benefits as the VoIP solution, but does not require a VoIP quality of service for your at-home agents. Chat is less expensive than VoIP because it doesn’t use as much bandwidth or RAM, and it requires less powerful processors.

I honestly don’t know if the Bird Flu will become a pandemic.  But, I do know that if it does take flight, your customers and your agents would appreciate your forethought.  Bird flu or not you have taken some the first steps towards business continuity for all types of disasters.
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 8:40 am and is filed under Disaster Recovery, VoIP, Voice Self Service. 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.