What could go wrong in your call center? Power outage? Data failure? Attack by irate customers? It's best to ask the question now, according to Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek.
The ideal situation would be to avoid a problem rather than addressing it after the fact. This involves thinking of all possible scenarios and having all angles covered. Much like a “troubleshooter” booklet, plans of prevention must be mapped out in detail depending on what types of problems may arise.
Most “disasters” will be caused by extreme weather situations, power outages, and electrical surges. Think of all possible scenarios in relation to the physical facility, data systems, center systems and applications, communication networks, customer access points, etc.
From the perspective of call center representatives, many disasters can be human-caused as well. Some that I've experienced:
- The IT department forgot to tell us that they were upgrading our systems, so we couldn't find the right screen anymore.
- The billing department forgot to tell us they were changing the rates, until customers started noticing it on their bills.
- The network technicians forgot to tell us that all our calls were being routed through different switches, so our customers were now getting error recordings we had never heard.
- Our chief financial officer didn't tell us that we were going bankrupt (I was working for Worldcom at the time).
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