A new and disturbing study by DMG Consulting, “Business as Usual? A Benchmarking Study of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for Contact Centers,” sponsored by Empirix, reveals that contact centers are ill-prepared for disasters and for equipment failures, while preventing or minimizing them could save millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The report documents contact centers’ readiness to adapt to disruptions caused by internal system and process changes and benchmarks how contact centers handle disaster recovery/business continuity strategies, plans, and testing. Here are the highlights:
* Less than 37 percent of companies are confident that their operations can withstand a disaster or business disruption
* 60.2 percent of firms are not routinely testing their core contact center infrastructure. This leaves them open to unexpected but avoidable failures
* Only 4.7 percent of firms test their disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plans monthly, leaving 95.3 percent at risk of a serious meltdown in an emergency situation
* 20 percent of contact centers do not even have a disaster recovery plan
The most common DR/BC approach, used by nearly 31 percent of survey participants, was to conduct business as usual at a less ambitious service level agreement (SLA) levels. The most common tactic to achieve this goal, selected by 40 percent, was to failover to a remote site. Meanwhile 18 percent prioritize sales and customer service transactions, but hold off on handling other types of transactions while just over 25 percent provide only basic coverage for calls.
“Unfortunately, the majority of companies surveyed have not made adequate investments to prevent disruptions to their mission critical service infrastructure, ” states Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “They run the risk of alienating customers in their time of need.”
“It seems surprising that companies would have an evacuation plan in place, but not one that details how to keep business operations running…