Call centers lack adequate disaster recovery plans

Empirix announced the results of the new DMG Consulting research study titled, “Business as Usual? A Benchmarking Study of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for Contact Centers.” The report, sponsored by Empirix, focuses on call centers and their plans for maintaining business operations in the event of an emergency.

The Disaster Recovery benchmarking study is the culmination of nearly 200 contact centers from all over the world surveyed on questions covering four key readiness areas: Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity; Applications and Systems Testing; Ongoing Verification of Applications and Call Flows; and Hosted Infrastructure and Applications. The report analyzes how companies prepare for disasters to ensure that their contact center systems are optimized to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

The results indicated that many contact centers, no matter what their size, are not taking the appropriate actions to minimize the impact of disasters, should they occur. Adding to this risk, the majority of these companies have not invested in testing and monitoring equipment to better understand, identify, and, in most cases, resolve issues before customers are affected.

A summary of specific research findings includes:

• Only 36.7% of companies globally are confident that they can survive a disaster or business disruption without seriously impacting their customers.
• Among companies with an established process for disaster recovery, 63.3% of managers were less than confident that the process would produce the desired results in case of a serious outage.
• Only 4.7% reported that their companies do regular and adequate testing, leaving 95.3% of companies represented in the survey open to a complete meltdown in the case of a disaster or extended outage.
• Incredibly, 20% of contact centers responding do not even have a disaster recovery plan.