David Reed talks with members about Business Continuity Planning sharing insights from his time running Orlando call centers at Walt Disney World before Y2K. He led the team that developed Walt Disney World’s overall business continuity plan to prepare for Y2K.
Business continuity is not just applicable for call centers but any organization / any business. Our business continuity planning process started by:
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Identifying the roles and responsibilities of our team (who’s in charge, key players, who are the customers / who are the technical people responsible for executing, etc.
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Identify the most important things that, if not done, will cause our business to suffer.
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What are the threats (example – the loss of power).
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And what is the impact? (note – some things may not be financially feasible).
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What are some pre-emptive actions?
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What are the workarounds?
And importantly, how do you activate the various components in your business continuity plan? What are the triggers that say, when this happens, this is what we want to do. If you’ve got a true emergency and things are out or down, the last thing you want to do is trying to figure this out on the fly. Just pull the trigger, and you’re just executing your plan.
At that point, an important step that some people don’t put in their business continuity plan is, how do I return to normal? If I had to go to a manual method at my call center (using a different logging ticket method because I lost my CRM or my ticketing system), how do I get back into getting that data back into the systems?
In focusing on call center type of work and we’ve got five key areas here (I call them The Big Five):
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Internet access
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Physical building issues
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Your phone/telephony system (losing access to your IVRs, your prompts, etc.)
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Your crucial business applications (CRM, your ticketing system, etc.)
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And agent availability is the last big one.
I think most people don’t do a very good job of really testing the plan.
David Reed is a regular contributing CCNG member who started his practice Customer Centered Consulting Group over 20 years ago to improve their customer service and process efficiency. He believes that excellence in these two areas, along with creating a positive work culture, are required to be world-class at delivering your product or service.
