Identifying Your Risks

Before you can develop your call center disaster recovery plan, you need to identify potential threats to your business operations. Some of the things that might shut down your call center include:

• Physical damage to your facility and equipment caused by a natural disaster or severe weather event
• Network and power outages originating outside your facility
• Internet outages resulting from service provider disruptions
• Software failures limiting access to customer databases and internal communication tools
• System issues, such as loss of caller ID functions and client databases

When you're planning for future disasters, having a backup plan already in place helps you maintain business continuity. A system such as 8x8 call center disaster recovery services reduces the impact of a major disruption in regular services because you can switch directly to virtual operation without having to wait for your physical servers to come back online. The ultimate goal is for customers to not even notice you've switched systems because performance remains the same.

In some cases, you may be able to get your physical site back up and running, but you need redundancy in place for this to happen. Generators and battery backup systems provide options when power outages interrupt operations.

Make sure that managers and IT staff members have access to emergency contacts, including contacts at the local power station and your network service provider. Knowing exactly who to call makes restoring necessary services easier.

Even when you have plans to restore physical operations, the restoration of equipment and services takes time. Cloud-based solutions let you shift immediately to a distributed system, so employees can continue working. Customer support employees can log in from their own homes or from remote locations around the world. 8x8's cloud communications platform includes data centers on five continents, so you can maintain consistent performance no matter how widespread the disaster is.

Call center disaster recovery solutions include restoring your entire operation to a new physical location or switching part or all of your regular operations to a cloud-based system. Choosing a global system with fault-tolerant architecture ensures that calls get completed even if a single database, independent server, or cluster of servers goes out of action.

Modern cloud-based call center services include access to unlimited voice calling, video and audio conferencing, supervisor analytics, and predictive dialing so you can carry out the same functions as you did at your physical location without requiring employees to be on-site. Switching to cloud-based call center operation not only prepares you for potential disaster situations but also reduces your overhead and streamlines operations when you're dealing with a global customer base.

The ability to quickly react during a disaster reduces your downtime and helps maintain continuity for customers and employees. That's why reliability is a key feature of an 8x8 disaster recovery system. Contact 8x8 to learn more about how a cloud-based disaster recovery system can help you prevent service disruptions when external events threaten your call center's regular operations.

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