How To: Disaster Planning

By Bill Curtin IV, Director of Corporate IT Services, Amtelco

John D. Rockefeller’s pragmatic view of disaster recovery – “I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.” – is one which holds true for today’s call center industry as it did for the oil industry of the late 1800s. But actually turning a disaster into a business opportunity involves much more than reacting to a difficult situation when it occurs.

The first step towards disaster recovery is disaster preparedness – identifying all of the emergencies that could confront a call center every day, and putting plans in place to deal with them in a quick, efficient, and effective manner.

Most call center clients expect more today then ever from their call centers. Many even require SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and proof that adequate disaster recovery plans are in place. In the event of an emergency, they want their calls to be answered.

The three most important resources to a call center to consider are the inbound telephone lines, the call center’s client data for properly processing calls and the labor to answer the calls. A good disaster recovery plan addresses all three of these resources.

In order for a call center to take calls, calls must have an inbound path to the ACD (Automated Call Distribution) system. There are many disasters that can make this inbound phone path go away, and it can be very challenging getting the calls forwarded to a backup location.

Using the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), a call center’s options are limited by the services its phone company can provide. Call Backup and Call Forwarding services that many phone companies provide vary greatly, so considering backup options when shopping for phone service is extremely important.

Alternative Routing or Call Overflow are common product names that many PSTN phone companies use for describing their call forwarding service. How these services work will also vary by service provider. Usually these services will allow a call center to forward all of its DID numbers to a single 800 toll-free number if phone service ever goes out.

If a call center subscribes to an Alternative Routing service that forwards to a toll-free number, it can add more flexibility to its phone routing by having the 800 number reside at a RespOrg (Responsible Organization) instead having the 800 number resident with its phone company. The services different RespOrgs provide also vary – some allow a call center to redirect calls to its 800 number using a Web site, while others require the subscriber call center to call in to make the forwarding request.

Sometimes trunk groups can be used to forward overflow calls to a backup location. Every phone company uses different names for these services, and finding the name of the service can be one of the bigger challenges.

Many call centers already are taking advantage of VoIP/SIP phone service providers, for a number of reasons and in equally as many ways. One advantage of these SIP (Session Initiation Protocol, an Internet transmission method) providers is that they can have DID lines from many area codes terminate to one IP (Internet Protocol) address.

Many call centers can realize a cost savings using these SIP services instead of using dedicated phone circuits to transport their DID traffic. These SIP phone providers also can aid in a call center’s disaster recovery plans.                                               

When a call center gets its phone service from a SIP provider, the phone service is sent to an Internet IP address. To move phone service to a call center’s backup facility, the SIP service provider directs the calls to another internet IP address. These IP addresses can be changed manually, through a Web site, or can be set up to failover automatically.

The newer VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technologies are allowing call centers to “co-locate” their hardware to off premise datacenters. When the hardware is housed off site, all the workers will connect to the system like remote operators.

In addition to easing worries over power constraints backup generator power, cooling, and internet connectivity, co-location takes many of the worries of disaster recovery planning as the datacenter has already addressed them. Even if you are using PSTN phone lines a co-location facility can provide you greater reliability. Data centers will have fiber SONNET rings connecting them to the phone company C/Os.  For a reasonable fee, datacenters will allow you to run your PSTN phone lines from the C/O to the datacenter on their SONNET ring, this provides two paths for your phone calls to travel from the C/O to the datacenter. If one of the paths disappears you will not notice any loss of service.

With this network architecture, the main disaster concern for a call center is maintaining the agent workstations, and as SIP connections can be initiated from any workstation with a live Internet connection, this is a very powerful operational model for reducing a call center’s risk in disaster situations.

Based on a similar principle, real-time data backup can be a powerful disaster recovery tool for any call center. Utilizing existing ISDN or T1 telephony connections, an off-premise data center can receive a live update whenever there is a change to a call center’s primary database. Based on a similar principle, real-time data backup can be a powerful disaster recovery tool for any call center. Several software solutions exist that allow you to backup databases over the internet. Instead of doing a full database backup, these backup software solutions backup the real-time changes.  Every time a change occurs, the data gets shipped to the backup database through the internet.

The backup databases can be located in dispersed and separate locations that are often geographically removed from the area that would be potentially impacted by an emergency.

In the event of a disaster that interrupts the primary database or ACD, the hardware at the data center, service can be restored within minutes by turning on your backup server. With service rerouted to the backup server, the operator can connect and process calls without noticing any difference from when they were connected to the primary server.

Reliability is fundamental to the reputation and success of any call center. Being fully prepared for a disaster, with devoted resources and plans of action in place, ensures that when a disaster occurs, the visible effect to the call center’s customers is as minimal as possible.

When a call center’s clients realize that a disaster has occurred and their service has not been affected in any way, the positive effect extends to all of the call center’s current and prospective customers. The call center has turned that disaster into a good client retention opportunity.