Business Continuity Plan

Ensuring Business Continuity Through Your Contact Center

Your contact center is critical to your organization’s success. But as the customer journey has evolved, so have customer expectations. Your customers, clients, and donors expect to be able to contact you when they need to and how they want to – and know that the person on the other end of the line will be able to solve their problem. Here’s how to ensure that your organization can seamlessly and effectively rise up to meet the expectations of today’s customers, no matter the situation.

Provide Omnichannel Solutions

Unlike the more linear customer journeys of the past, today’s customer experience can vary dramatically. Your business must be able to meet customers where they are in their journey and on the platform they prefer to use. This means that in addition to providing a traditional telephone call center experience, your team needs to be able to communicate via chat, email, and text. They also need to be able to instantly glean where a customer or client is in the sales cycle and what they need to meet their goal or feel supported. To achieve this and minimize redundancy or repetition in the experience, you need access to an integrated system that provides instant insight into the customer’s current standing with you.

You’ll need:

  • A cloud-based, integrated system that offers 360-degree views into the customer journey
  • The ability to connect and communicate with customers in their preferred medium
  • Agile, trained reps who can adaptively respond to a variety of questions or problems
  • Around-the-clock answering services and availability.

Monitor and Analyze

Data and analytics are critical for ensuring a smooth, streamlined experience for both customers and agents. If your system is still analog or involves components that don’t “speak” to each other, you’re missing out on valuable insights about your performance – as well as opportunities to improve the customer experience. An all-in-one, integrated system backed by powerful real-time analytics can help anticipate upticks in demand, bridge gaps in experience, and identify additional training needs.

Leveraging data and analytics can help you:

  • Anticipate when and how to scale up or down agent availability
  • Improve routing scripts for faster and more relevant call answering, and reduce transfers
  • Track typical customer paths to identify common questions, challenges, or support request
  • Identify knowledge gaps or satisfaction issues that can be addressed with training
  • Monitor system uptime and load, identifying when expanded resources might be required.

Plan for the Unexpected

Most businesses have forecasting in place for likely challenges and scenarios. But having a crisis plan in place in case of less likely challenges is critical for ensuring continuity in the event of a major obstacle. These might include a reputational crisis, a major outage, or global events. Having a business continuity plan (BCP) in place in case of an emergency can help ensure smooth sailing.

This plan might include:

  • Proactive outreach to clients or customers, reducing incoming call load on customer contact agents
  • An instantly scalable pool of virtual agents to help meet increased call volume demand
  • Multiple contact options in the event of one contact channel going down
  • A backup of all business-critical operations to minimize downtime and reduce the risk of information loss.

Your BCP isn’t a one-time thing. Continue to revisit your plan, test it, and make adjustments as needed to ensure that you can take control of the situation if a crisis arises.  

Ensure Contact Center Continuity with ACD Direct

At ACD, we understand that your contact center plays a key role in your customer experience and organizational success. We also have a deep understanding of modern customer behavior and preferences – and have leveraged this into a powerful, integrated contact center platform that can deliver the performance, insights, and scalability you need to meet both day-to-day and once-in-a-lifetime challenges.

With built-in redundancies, omnichannel messaging, and a pool of contact agents to help augment your own team on demand, we can help you seamlessly achieve the critical, non-stop customer service that your customers, clients, and donors expect. For more information about our solutions, get in touch today.

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