How to Design a Contact Center Disaster Recovery Plan

Imagine you come into work one morning, to find smoke pouring from several floors of your building.  While your staff are all safe on the street, the entire building is out of power – and your contact center is going to be offline until the situation is safely resolved.  

Next, let’s assume the cleanup is relatively quick, and your agents are able to return to the office later that week. Everyone can get happily back to work delivering exceptional customer experiences…or can they?

There’s a problem. The fire seems to have also damaged your IT closet. Thankfully, your people are safe, but the same can’t be said for your call center equipment and on-premise data repository. Your IVRs, queues, virtual agents, customer data, tickets…where are they?

You realize you need a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Immediately thereafter, you realize the time to design and implement that plan was “any time before a few days ago.”  

The perfect time for building such a plan is before you actually need it – so if you’re reading this blog, let’s get into it.

Building Blocks of a Successful Disaster Recovery Plan

One cornerstone of disaster recovery is duplication and redundancy. You need copies of your data, which are updated in real-time or nearly so, with the idea being your contact center is able to quickly resume more or less where it left off, with minimal gaps to fill in. Geographic separation is crucial, to minimize the chances of any one event affecting all of your storage instances.

However, data isn’t the only component of a strong DR plan. Ideally, you’ll also want your processing power – including your computers, servers, and data centers – running in duplicate (or “active-active”)  as well. In the above scenario, if your call center had this failover capacity, it might not have been down at all, or only very briefly.  

Then, of course, there’s the plan itself. Be sure to cover these critical elements:

• People – The individuals and teams tasked with overseeing the plan, preparations, and execution.
• Priorities – The process of identifying and prioritizing components that most need attention (see points of failure).  
• Points of failure  – The most mission-critical and/or least redundant systems, data, and processes. These need to be tackled first.  
• Duplication – The specific means of duplicating your systems for maximum redundancy. Where will they be located? What’s the recovery point objective, which determines the frequency of backups? What’s the process, and does it run in real-time or nearly so? Who has access to these facilities, and who controls the backup process?  
• Optimization – What does your testing routine look like? How often does it run, and who reviews the results and makes suggestions?  

How UJET Makes Disaster Recovery Planning Easy

Now that you have some grounding in how to build a DR plan for your contact center - and how much time, effort, and expertise it can require - let’s show you how UJET takes a great deal of that pressure off your shoulders, with inherently strong DR and business continuity capabilities for your virtual call center.

First, it’s worth noting that UJET covers the full spectrum of DR needs for your virtual call center, including:

• Doubly redundant voice media layers (agent & AI communications)
• Triply redundant PSTN ingress/egress
• Backup phone numbers configured for wait-time SMS
• Data replicated across servers running in active-active mode and nearly real-time, across different geographic regions
• Servers replicated across multiple public cloud zones (e.g. GCP, AWS)
• Virtual call center configuration support from UJET in the case of an incident

While UJET’s intelligent contact center technology covers virtually all of the components of the suggested plan above, you will still want to determine which of your virtual call center staff are “on point” in the case of a disaster. You should also be clear about what they’re expected to check and report on, and you’ll want to ensure they know the most expedient means of interfacing with UJET. 

No time for downtime? UJET has you covered.

Take your business continuity and DR capabilities even further, with an optional (and award-winning) service from UJET called CX Intercloud. Another industry first from UJET, CX Intercloud addresses a long-standing issue with the reliability of cloud contact centers: downtime. If the underlying cloud provider experiences an outage, many or all customers of the contact center could be affected.

The feature runs your contact center services in a shared and parallel manner – not only between regions but between two or more cloud providers, each with multiple geographically separate data centers.  If one provider fails or becomes unavailable, the other will instantly and seamlessly assume service responsibility.  

Each stack performs comprehensive load-balancing and is capable of supporting 100 percent of the workload – delivering next-generation business continuity, disaster recovery, redundancy, and resiliency.

While you may need DR plans for other aspects of your business, you and your support team can rest easy knowing that the call center side of the equation is covered in the event of an emergency.  For a deeper dive into how UJET delivers DR peace of mind, check out our disaster recovery overview.