How Resilient Is Your Call Centre’s Telecommunications Network?
The operational costs of a modern day call centre are significant, which means that the serious impact of any interruption of the day to day running of a call centre cannot be overstated. There are no interruptions that are more significant to any call centre than telecommunications problems, or a telecommunications outage. In short, if your agents can’t make calls, they can’t make sales, which will cause your organisation to hemorrhage money for the duration of the problem. Due to the significant impact that telecommunications issues can have, it is always important to question how resilient your telecommunications network is. Below are just some of the things you need to consider.
Do you and your suppliers host equipment in multiple data centres?
It is always prudent for any call centre to always consider the worst case scenario, which is why many organisations host their equipment within a data centre. One of the inherent benefits of hosting your equipment within a data centre is that they are built with resiliency in mind. With back up power sources and multiple methods of connectivity, they are undoubtedly the the best for hosting equipment, however, this doesn’t mean that your services cannot be effected by an outage. In order to be 100% certain that your service is always on, you should ensure that both you, and your telecommunications supplier operate out of dual data centres.
Do you have a backup generator or UPS?
UPS is an acronym for Uninteruptable Power Supply, which is what many call centres use accompanied with, or instead of a back up power generator to ensure that operations aren’t interrupted in the event of a power outage. However unlikely it may seem, your call centre would be seriously effected by a power cut, which is why back up power should be given serious consideration for resiliency purposes.
ISDN or SIP? Why not both?
Many call centres will use ISDN or SIP technology for the routing of their calls, however, what many fail to consider is what would happen if a problem manifested on their ISDN lines, or their connectivity to their SIP provider were to fail. The logical solution to this problem is to operate both SIP and ISDN with one waiting in the background purely for resiliency purposes. Therefore, in the event of an issue with one, you can simply switch to the alternative without significant interruption.
How can you deal with issues outside of your control?
There may be occasions where a third party problem impacts on your ability to operate, and in these situations it is important to have a solution in place to manage the influx of inbound calls. The implementation of inbound call management services will allow you to upload announcement messages to advise customers of any known issues, and ask them to call back at a later date for an update rather than take up the time of your agents.