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October 13, 2008 |
By Gary A. Pudles,
President and Chief Executive Officer, The AnswerNet Network
Contact centers have become the arteries of organizations, enabling customer care, retention, inbound and outbound sales, fundraising and donations, and direct response. So before a disaster threatens or strikes, take effective measures to protect your centers and the services they provide.
Disasters can impact the demand for contact centers, negatively and positively. These events can temporarily displace customers, and revenues, but they also can drive up sales, such for building products and services, and prompt inbound and outbound fundraising for relief efforts.
1. Consequences of contact center closure
Here’s what happens when contact centers close. Customers may hear busy signals indicating overloaded or downed phone circuits, receive standard auto-attendant messages or hang-ups, or be put on hold for long periods of time with no explanation. Emails, faxes, web chat requests and callbacks are often forgotten.
Some customers may then become sufficiently annoyed with you to shop elsewhere; and their reactions are understandable. Most people probably do not realize that a disaster has hit your contact centers.
If you provide a critical service such as electricity, gas, telecom, water, healthcare, financial services or transportation, your customers expect you to be there. Your call volume may jump and callers may be impatient and worried.
If the affected contact centers were handling income-producing calls, such as inbound direct response, signing up new clients, or outbound telemarketing and collections, you could lose customers and revenues.
2. Analyze impacts of closure to your operations
To ensure customer service, retention and income without spending money unnecessarily, analyze the loss of your contact centers to your organization. Look at how long they have been down, and what this has cost you. Once you know how much disasters have harmed, or can harm, your operations, you can then assess solutions for their cost-effectiveness and justify investments and programs.
3. Steps to take to protect your contact centers
Begin by disaster-proofing your contact centers. You can avoid costly downtime by detecting and fixing trouble spots - like leak-prone hot water tanks located above computer rooms and phone switches that are not connected into backup power circuits.
Take steps to minimize contact volumes while retaining service and revenues. See which contacts you can divert to interactive voice response (IVR), web self-service, or into voicemail. Are there programs you can defer, like outbound surveys?
If there are services that live agents normally handle, such as order entry, tell your customers on the auto-attendant: “We are experiencing an emergency that is impacting our ability to serve you. For quicker service please use our voice menu, visit our web site, or leave a message.” Make sure you have emergency scripts and pages pre-written for quick uploading.
If you are heavily relying on IVR and your web site to stay in touch with customers, consider having them hosted at backup locations in the event of a disaster. Also, you may experience a jump in IVR usage. Carefully weigh up buying additional IVR ports, particularly if your business strategy is to encourage more customers to use self-service, or contracting with an outsourcer, which saves you on the up-front costs.
All contact centers should have battery-powered uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). They enable sites to ride out brief power outages; they also permit orderly shut down and data backup if centers must be closed.
Contact centers that must stay open need onsite generators, hooked into UPS systems to eliminate power fluctuations that can damage computers.
To control generator size and cost, determine the minimum number of workstations that you need, and which circuits are essential to keep your centers operational. For example you can, in most cases, get away with keeping the air conditioning, which consumes huge quantities of electricity, off the backup power circuits; an exception is if your site also has a data center that needs constant cool temperature.
Arrange beforehand for a skeleton crew to staff your phones during disasters. Many employees will not stay if there is an imminent threat, or if they have young children or elderly parents that need their care. If your contact center is essential and you have experienced high contact volumes before, during or after a disaster, plan ahead of time so that you have enough workstations and staff; alternatively, look at outsourcing to help shoulder some of the load.
Be prepared for unexpected disruptions. When BellSouth, anticipating an evacuation order during Hurricane Ivan that never came, ended their local phone service in Mobile, Alabama, our contact center there was forced to shut down. Our team reached the telco, explained our situation, and they quickly reconnected the service.
Also, avoid making outbound calls from contact centers that are threatened or have been hit with disasters. You then keep phone circuits free for essential services.
4. How to best move contacts to other sites, and to outsourcers
There will be disasters that will force shifting contacts to other facilities. You can accommodate the extra volume at remaining sites, or ask outsourcers to handle them.
If you go it alone, make sure you have extra desks, phones and computers at the backup sites. When events threaten or occur, ask staff to stay longer, arrive earlier and come in on their days off. The manager of our Santa Rosa, California contact center, one of several that took calls rerouted from our Florida sites that were hit by Hurricane Frances, paid overtime and brought in sandwiches for the employees.
If you outsource, query vendors about their disaster response methods. Because there will be events that will prompt outsourcers’ contact centers to close, select those firms that have networked sites located around the country, and/or in Canada.
Set out your requirements in writing. A large utility client stipulated a multi-level disaster recovery plan in their contract with us. It includes assigning calls to sites equipped with UPSs and generators, routing calls to backup sites, offsite data backup over multiple routes, and multiple Internet connections.
Whether contacts are handled at backup sites or at outsourcers’ centers, devise agent scripting ahead of time. While these staffers will then have the basics to meet most callers’ needs, in order to handle sophisticated inquiries put in escalation procedures.
Plan the rerouting ahead of time for seamless switchover. When hurricanes threaten our contact centers, we begin reroutes 72 to 48 hours ahead of landfall. Clients’ catalog, e-tail and direct response order entry, and customer care calls were diverted to alternate sites without their customers noticing any difference in the service.
Also, route a share of your regular volume to the outsourcer to keep their staff fresh and up to date; this way if a disaster strikes they can effectively handle the additional calls. A utility industry client splits their volume roughly 85/15 between the lead contact center and a backup site located over 100 miles away, for this reason.
Most importantly, make sure your customers are in the loop. In anticipation of Hurricane Ivan, our Mobile team placed a recording on local accounts that asked callers to “please be patient as we are experiencing a large volume of calls and we would get to them as quickly as possible.”
And should your contact center also handle shipping and receiving, redirect incoming goods to alternate sites out of harm’s way. There are many third party fulfillment and logistics firms that can receive, store, fill orders and ship products and literature for you.
5. Managing disaster impacts on contact center demand
If a major disaster has or will hit large areas where you have many customers, consider canceling or postponing, if possible, marketing campaigns aimed at them until well after voice/data and power are restored and residents have returned to their homes. Many customers will have gone off line when utility service ended or were evacuated. They may have experienced loss of income and/or have other priorities, such as rebuilding their homes and businesses.
If your firm markets products and services that are used in disaster response and recovery, from building supplies to portable generators, check from your past records to see if demand had increased. If so, then consider either adding more staff or outsourcing. Nonprofit organizations should examine both options to handle inbound and outbound calls for fundraising, donations and to manage relief efforts. When major events happen, people want to call and are willing to be called, so they can help others in need.
By providing quality contact center services, you and your customers will successfully get through disasters together.
The AnswerNet Network, www.answernet.com, is a leading contact center outsourcer and telemessaging firm. It is a major provider of inbound, outbound and ebound voice and text-based customer contact and fulfillment services. The AnswerNet Network handles order entry, sales, direct response, lead qualification, telephone answering services and other customer management functions from 55 contact centers and two fulfillment centers. It serves over 35,000 clients, and processes more than 60 million contacts annually.
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