There’s no need to let a disaster worry you, not when you have a business continuity and recovery plan.

With a plan in place, you can face whatever event lands on your doorstep, whether it’s weather-related, a man-made occurrence, geopolitical risk, company-created situation, or something else potentially just as stressful.

Without it, your entire operation could be affected for hours, days, or even weeks! Factor in the potential for millions in lost revenue and you realize that having a business plan is an absolute necessity.

These five tips can help you develop a plan to ensure you’re protected.

1. Assess Risks to Your Business Continuity

When it comes to ensuring business continuity, start by identifying the risks your contact center may experience in the event of a disaster. These could include loss of incoming calls due to a network outage or other service disruption, loss of network-based information, such as caller ID, or loss of database and other supporting information systems. Gather information about current capabilities, possible hazards, and consider what a worst-case scenario would look like.

2. Develop Backup Options

After you have assessed the most critical components, develop efficient backup options to restore normal functioning as quickly as possible. Backup options include implementation of an automatic cloud failover and call continuity, backup of emergency power supply systems and system-level software, and options for alternate call routing.

3. Test, Monitor & Update Your Plan

After developing backup options, test and monitor your plan routinely to make sure it achieves the intended results. Not only that, but as you onboard new technologies, people, and vendors, update the plan to ensure adherence and required performance. Ongoing testing, monitoring, and maintenance will safeguard that you have the necessary tools to assess a possible disaster and its impact on your services.

4. Define Vendor Service Level Agreements

Determine the level of support provided by external contractors. Tie service levels to specific outage thresholds and require onsite support should a disaster occur.

5. Partner with an Outsourced Provider

Engaging with an outsourced contact center vendor can support your overall operations not only in the event of a disaster but also in high call volume situations or when there is a need to scale, such as during busy seasons.

Conclusion

You can never be sure when disaster will strike.

Don’t risk unnecessary downtime and loss of revenue. Have a business continuity and recovery plan in place that addresses the needs of all constituencies impacted by an outage — customers, staff, and vendors alike.

If outsourcing is part of your plan, consider the advantages Transparent BPO can offer.

We ensure 99.999% uptime thanks to redundancy between our data centers in Miami and Belize through ARCOS, the undersea fiber ring which connects the Americas and the Caribbean. If one data center goes down, we can quickly reroute to the other and keep the network running. Battery and generator backup further ensures reliability.

Our internet demarcation point is guarded by Sonicwall NSA-series firewalls to protect our network and connections to our customers from anti-virus, intrusions, and malware.

To protect our clients’ customers’ personally-identifiable information, we are a PCI DSS Level 1 provider, SOC2 certified, and HIPAA compliant.

Learn more about our technology or schedule a call with one of our advisers.