Frost & Sullivan has unveiled its latest report, ‘Confronting the Unpredictable in the World of Customer Contact: Strategies for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.’ According to Frost & Sullivan, the core of business continuity/disaster recovery or BC/DR policies are the customer contact companies.
These companies are the major point of contact in the event of a calamity or disaster. As these companies are mainly involved in broadcasting information, a broad assortment of BC/DR-enabling methods and solutions are available for dealing with the various types of events.
In a statement, Brendan Read, industry analyst, Information and Communication Technologies Industry at Frost & Sullivan, said, "The importance of information during times of such distress has made a strong case for advanced and multilayered BC/DR methods. This enables contact centers to plan, respond and recover from natural and man-made disasters."
With the increase in mobility and launch of social media, customers are demanding for live updates on delays, disruptions and modifications to the products and services they buy. According to a Frost & Sullivan survey conducted among more than 250 IT managers in 2012, only 31 percent of respondents said that their companies were ready to deal with outages and disasters.
Customer contact companies are unable to balance the potential risks and losses from harsh conditions and the investments required for implementing effective BC/DR solutions. As these events are unpredictable, these companies have decreased motivation to implement the BC/DR solutions.
Customer contact companies require a BC/DR solution which not only supports customers, employees, and operations but also decreases their capital investments and operational expenses. Companies need to choose sites away from susceptible areas, "multishoring," allowing employees to work from home, deploying applications and data in the cloud, ensuring multiple backup and response tools and channels, alerting customers through proactive customer contact, and enhancing contact center access control.
Read said, "The incremental costs of providing full business continuity versus business disruption also should be considered. Finally, all BC/DR strategies depend on how well these plans are drafted and kept up-to-date, and how effectively the staff is trained to handle them. These measures must also include methods to protect their most important assets, which are their employees."
