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MELVILLE, NY – September 1, 2005 – In the wake of Hurricane Katrina,
the subject of business continuity in the face of major natural challenges is an
obvious one. Call centers must provide essential services in case of, and
sometimes because of, an emergency situation. CosmoCom, The Contact Center
On-Demand™ Company, provides location-independent, all-IP technology that has
survivability built-in, as tested and proven recently in the typhoons of Taiwan.
Weathering a Typhoon
A typhoon is essentially a hurricane-class storm occurring in the North
Pacific, west of the International Date Line. Trade-Van operates a 24/7 call
center powered by CosmoCom’s Contact Center On-Demand technology in
typhoon-prone Taiwan. Since typhoons tend to be more vigorous and more numerous
than hurricanes, Trade-Van needed a solid action plan for the times when they
occur. Closing the call center was not an option. But the center facility can
become completely inaccessible during the worst storms, by any means of
transportation.
Instead of suspending operations, Trade-Van uses the built-in virtual call
center capability of CosmoCall Universe, and agents work from home when they can’t
get to the office. This is not a theoretical plan that sits on a shelf or in a
drawer. Trade-Van has invoked this plan 4 times in the past year alone.
What about Katrina?
In the case of Katrina, the whole city of New Orleans was evacuated. If
agents can’t stay at home either, the Trade-Van approach requires some
adjustments. CosmoCom business continuity experts recommend the following:
- All system servers must be hosted in a high ground, weatherproof
facility.
- Evacuated agents can take calls from a standby location, such as
PC-equipped, satellite-connected trailers. Companies like Agility
Recovery Solutions and Globecomm Systems focus on providing such
facilities.
- Alternatively, evacuated agents can work from any location with a laptop
and headset, and a high speed Internet connection. These days even
budget motels offer free high-speed Internet. CosmoCom recommends that
companies contract in advance for such rooms for their call center
employees, making sure that the total bandwidth available is adequate
for the number of concurrent users. This approach can
provide cost-effective business continuity as well as a valuable
benefit to employees and their families.
Trade-Van’s Virtual Call Center
Trade-Van Information Services Co., based in Taipei, Taiwan and partly owned
by the Taiwan Ministry of Finance, provides organizations with a range of
information services including cargo clearance, e-commerce, global logistics,
finance, insurance, land information, and tax filing solutions.
By far the greatest challenge facing Trade-Van’s support team was the need
to ensure nonstop, 24/7 operation to its customers in a region where employees
often cannot travel to work during typhoon emergencies.
In addition to non-stop operation during typhoons, Trade-Van also needed
additional functionality such as multiple contact channels (chat, E-mail, voice
mail), management reports, etc. CosmoCall Universe was selected by Trade-Van as
the advanced solution that met their needs. Agents can be anywhere, working with
any channel, as long as an IP connection is available. The management,
administration, and real-time monitoring tools are all web-based, allowing
supervisors, also working at home, to function as if they and the agents were in
the office.
To prepare for typhoons, Trade-Van took several steps:
- Equipping the agents’ homes with ADSL IP links
- Dividing the workforce into two teams to take duty turns during an
emergency
- Performing several dry runs
This did not end with drills. Trade-Van activated the "home
office" plan four times in the year 2004 because of typhoons. The longest
continuous period during which the contingency plan was running was 48 hours.
This occurred when the strong, slow-moving Typhoon Aere lashed Taiwan on August
24, 2004. Howling winds and torrential rain battered Taipei and forced the
closing of financial markets, offices, and schools for two days. The most recent
invocation of the plan was for Typhoon Matsa, which forced the closure of
schools and government offices on August 5, 2005.
Despite all this wind and rain, Trade-Van remained open for business.
About CosmoCom
CosmoCom™ , The Contact Center On-Demand™ Specialist, empowers organizations
to achieve higher levels of customer service while reducing costs, by supporting
their enterprise-wide contact center needs from one all-IP, virtual contact
center platform, self-hosted or hosted by a network service provider. Its
flagship product, CosmoCall Universe™ , is the multi-tenant hosting platform of
choice for top tier network service providers worldwide, and is fast becoming a
favorite for their own customer care as well. The platform unifies all
communication channels, including telephone, videophone, email, voice mail and
Web chat/voice/video/collaboration, and also unifies the contact center
functions of automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice and video
response (IVVR), computer telephony integration (CTI), recording and quality
monitoring, interaction history, and administration and reporting. CosmoCom
customers include service providers such as BT, Deutsche Telekom, France
Telecom, NTT, EagleACD, and many others, as well as Fortune-class enterprises
throughout the world. For more information, please visit www.cosmocom.com.
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