Hosting offers new choices for enterprise and contact center managers, as it expands the range of vendors offering viable technology, systems and applications. As always, enterprises should first decide what capabilities they need and then decide which solutions best meet their needs. Due to financial constraints, some organizations are finding that the only way they can acquire new contact center solutions today is to use the hosted model. In other situations, hosted offerings are simply strong alternatives to premise‐based licensable offerings. There is no compelling reason to transition any particular function in the contact center to a hosted environment, unless one of these solutions or this acquisition model is more suitable or advantageous. 29 Business as Usual? © 2008 DMG Consulting LLC
V.
Best Practices for Keeping a
Contact Center Fully Operational
Contact centers are complex and often expensive operating areas that use people and technology to deliver service to customers. While it is the people who interact with and are most remembered by customers, it’s the technology that delivers the calls, emails, chats, faxes, etc., to agents. When the technology fails, contact centers are unable to service their customers. Most contact center system failures or service interruptions are either avoidable or can be mitigated by testing, monitoring and planning. A contact center manager cannot prevent a carrier network from failing, but there can be internal systems in place to send an immediate alert when the call volume drops below the expected level. A contingency plan can be enacted to allow the contact center to receive its calls over an alternative carrier.
It can be somewhat tedious and time consuming to build contact center monitoring, contingency, disaster recovery and business continuity plans, but this preparation could save millions of dollars in lost revenue, either by preventing or minimizing the impact of negative events. Here are best practices for keeping the contact center working optimally during both normal and challenging times:
Routine Monitoring
• Use automation to test mission‐critical systems, processes and workflows daily. • Test non‐mission‐critical systems, processes, workflows and all of their
integrations monthly. • Test for both overall performance and ability to meet departmental SLAs. Change Management • Build in sufficient time to thoroughly test any changes to systems, processes and workflows.
• Involve both IT and contact center business managers in planning, testing and approving test results.
• Use a technology lifecycle or comprehensive approach (addressing all internal and external impacts) to test any new or enhanced application.
• Unit‐test the enhanced or new system, process or workflow initially.
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• Conduct integration testing once the new or enhanced system, process or workflow successfully completes unit testing. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity • Contact centers of all sizes must have a DR and BC plan. • Design the plan to keep contact center activities operational but at a lower SLA during the duration of the incident. • Develop a cost effective back‐up design using a combination of network routing, automated failover, remote locations, hosted contact center infrastructure and outsourcers.
• Assign a department DR manager to create, enhance, test and maintain the plan; this person should work cooperatively with enterprise DR and BC planning organization. • Test the DR and BC plan monthly. 31 Business as Usual? © 2008 DMG Consulting LLC
VI.
Final Thoughts
Nobody likes to think about disasters, but whether they are “acts of God” or man‐made, they do happen. Not every company will be hit by a disaster, but all contact centers have to be prepared. Contact center managers must have disaster recovery and business continuity plans that can keep them in operation, albeit at a lower service level, if service disruption occurs. Managers cannot prevent disasters from happening, but they can limit the damage.
Contact centers of all sizes, all over the world, can avoid internally caused system disruptions by implementing solutions and best practices to monitor and test the performance of their essential solutions on an ongoing and consistent basis. Mission‐ critical systems, processes and workflows should be checked daily to ensure that they are working properly. The rest of the contact center supporting applications, processes and best practices should be tested monthly to identify changes that could result in service degradation.
Lastly, the intricacy and complexity of contact center system integrations requires that all new and enhanced applications be fully tested on a stand‐alone and integrated basis prior to being put into operation. To succeed with this testing, IT and contact center managers must work together to build and implement comprehensive test plans.
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Appendix A: DMG’s Research Methodology
DMG’s research goal is to obtain an unbiased response to our surveys to provide readers with a benchmark of how other companies perform or handle the issues addressed in each study. To achieve this goal, DMG invites contact center and IT managers, decision makers, leaders and executives to participate in our surveys. We use a variety of outlets for inviting participants, including DMG’s highly qualified newsletter list, online trade publications and newsletters that are read by our target audience and other relevant lists, based on the content of our studies.
DMG strives to obtain a representative group of participants that reflects the contact center market. Therefore, we reach out to small, mid‐size, large and very large contact centers. And, we invite contact center and IT leaders and managers from the US, Canada, and the rest of the world to participate.
DMG requires a minimum of 100 complete responses in order to provide high quality, representative results. To achieve this goal, we often receive input from as many as 200 participants, some of whom only answer a portion of a survey. All participants are invited to receive a copy of the survey Report to thank them for their participation. 33 Business as Usual? © 2008 DMG Consulting LLC