Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek, asks, "Is your call center prepared for the worst?"

We spend a lot of time optimizing our businesses, devising plans to make them perform superbly, but not many of us play the pessimist.  Recovering from catastrophe needs to be a top priority too.

Issues need to be addressed other than those relating to data processing and IT issues.  A recovery plan needs to be put in place for partial, extreme, and complete system failures. 

A Gartner Group study indicates that 40% of centers ultimately fail after an outage of more than a few days.  In a comparable study done by the University of Minnesota, numbers showed only 6% of companies survived an outage of high magnitude.

A successful call center manager facilitates the best, and a part of that process is being prepared for the worst.

For further reading: hanging up on customers to improve your scores