Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and even wildfires are some of the usually unannounced and unexpected disasters that can occur at any time, but a disaster doesn’t always involve natural forces.
A disaster can strike your business at any time, as we’ve seen during this year 2020 with many businesses worldwide, and it is usually when you least expect it and in many shapes and forms.
A power loss can be a huge disaster in a manufacturing industry, in businesses that deal with high volume of messages, a shortage of communication due to internet failure can lead to money losses added to a customer’s loss of confidence in the product and the company.
Therefore, creating a business disaster recovery plan is a must.
1. Back-up, redundancy and recovery
A great example of being prepared is seen in most call centers, where large units of data is managed and transmitted between agents and customers, so a power outage could be critical for the company. Another important thing to consider is data security, all call centers handle customer’s information and keeping it safe is a key part of the business, alongside with productivity and customer service.
A disaster recovery plan is necessary in all call centers in order to reduce the impact that most disruptions could cause to the business. And so, either you spend on labor and infrastructure, or you outsource it to them. The easiest, most cost-effective way could be to have a call and contact center at your disposal. The proper call center will have your back, and help you oversee potential risks and security breaches, immediate manpower in place, as well as hardware checkups, software licensing, digital infrastructure, cloud-based solutions and more.
2. Where are the risks?
To create a disaster recovery plan that oversees the whole business, you will need to do intensive research into all possible dangers that may affect your business, however unlikely, a wide range of possible risks should be considered.
From a loss of communications due to black-outs, loss of network-based information, internet outage to human error and damage to equipment due to natural disasters.
In the case of a natural disaster, you should think about the physical damage to the equipment, and when infrastructure goes down, your entire customer experience could be affected as the calls stop. And this is adding another disaster to our list of problems to oversee.
An intensive and also creative time should be spent looking into the task of defining issues, as it is vital to cover most of the possible scenarios to see potential risks accurately and have a realistic, functioning disaster recovery plan.
3. Tailor your Recovery Plan
Now that you have been through the process of identifying most of the risks faced by your business, a disaster recovery plan should be tailored to effectively solve these issues with a fluent, flawless and smooth transition. If applied properly, your customers should not even notice a change.
As mentioned above, a clear and simple option is to outsource your customer service, tech support, sales, back office, document processing, and any repetitive process. through a BPO.
Or, the alternative is to take care of each of the steps to ensure business continuity.
It is key to always have Backups, human or tech, as all data needs a backup system, so do your customers. So backup. Keep in mind that you should research all cloud-based backup solutions, to guarantee that information is never lost when the power goes out.
Contact all emergency and security institutions in your area to get contingency, evacuation and safety plans on your location, to develop your own following the right instructions and all the laws.
The IT team needs to work on an emergency contact list that includes all power supply companies, tech and maintenance service suppliers, likewise, get the managers to update contact lists of all vendor and network service providers. This will ensure that all necessary parties can be contacted as quickly as possible.
A top online security system to protect data should be needed. So look for several options and develop a specific budget created for this system.
Take into account all legal related situations due to disasters to have a specific course of action on this matter, too.
Get options on power supplies, you should probably need a generator, back up batteries.
The key for most businesses to survive during these times of hardships is to keep calls or visitors coming in. So think about any possibility that helps assure this, be it working from home or mobile, redirecting calls to another one of your offices, or outsourcing this support.
Having distant sites and locations can be a huge plus in business recovery plans.
4. Act don’t React
Not knowing the risks your business is up against and getting cut off-guard are two of the worst enemies anyone can have, so get started early, act and don’t let any contingency get in the way of your business.
When a cable, internet, or power outage occurs, companies that put their disaster recovery plan to work effectively will make a shortage or outage that lasts a couple of hours feel like it took only minutes.
Call centers’ disaster recovery plans are no different, you have already worked all possible angles to make these risks lower, so if a disaster happens in your area, they are ready to handle everything the right way to guarantee your customers get the attention they deserve.
Planning your strategy, but most importantly acting ahead, is what should really define the effectiveness of your disaster recovery plan.
