Building A Resilient Contact Center

Defining Requirements

While it might be tempting to say everyone should buy five nines of reliability and every vendor should offer it, the reality is not that simple. High- erforming, resilient solutions require a substantive investment in technology along with the people to set up and maintain the monitoring, troubleshooting and remediation protocols. Bigger organizations have more resources and focus on these issues (and, perhaps, have more to lose). But smaller companies need to consider it, too. There are some good options to do so, as we’ll demonstrate in the cloud section of this article. Financial services and utilities can be viewed as leaders in striving for resilience. Heathcare, retail, manufacturing, and others follow closely behind. Finding cost-effective solutions feels easier if you have multiple sites, but you still must focus on the technology and where it resides.

As a starting point to defining your requirements, consider what would happen if you lost your contact center technology for minutes, hours or more. Maybe you think you can endure a short blip, but consider what happens next. A few minutes outage can leave the center playing catch up on service level (and perhaps, customer satisfaction) all day. If minutes turn into hours, or become too frequent, where will customers turn for assistance? What would the impact be on other channels or departments? Who would hear about it, and how? Would you risk losing business— whether short-term sales, or longer term loyalty? Would your customer take to the “airwaves” of social media, risking brand damage? You get the idea.

Smart leaders consider many factors in defining resiliency requirements. They work with IT to define scenarios and how redundancy and resiliency can prevent and mitigate the more likely ones.

Start with the voice and data networks, seeking to eliminate single points of failure in connectivity to carriers and your LAN, WAN, Internet, MPLS, etc. Chances are you need some resiliency built into your core routing and reporting. Most think of voice first, but centers increasingly need to consider other media as well. That can be more complicated if different solutions route the various media versus an integrated routing and reporting engine.

Most workforce optimization tools (WFM, QM, etc.) don’t need to be redundant, but think about how long you can be without them. If you’re large, you probably can’t live too long without your WFM without risking some serious inefficiencies. Those with regulatory or compliance demands need to ensure recordings are always captured and perhaps backed up or duplicated in real-time.

If your IVR carries a heavy workload (e.g., financial services, utilities), you probably want some redundancy and geographic diversity on the ports. CRM or a core system may be mission critical for some, as it is important to track contact records and not risk losing that history. This one can be tricky if it is the system of record. When it is down, other solution availability can become moot if agents can’t address customer needs anyway. So, it may be the starting point to form the baseline of center availability.