A successful Business Continuity (BC) or Disaster Recovery (DR) plan can be heavily attributed to proper planning, stakeholder awareness, and system capabilities. When deploying a cloud based Call Center, it is imperative to incorporate the different situations that are encountered into a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan. Consideration should be given to where queued calls will be sent, including alternative locations, queues, or agents. Because Evolve IP queues calls in the cloud, it is far more likely that local conditions (where agents reside and are presented calls) will drive which BC/DR processes or procedures are implemented. Some of the events that require a defined BC/DR process include:
- Power failures
- Inclement weather (Snowstorms, Hurricanes, Flooding)
- Carrier Access (last mile) outages
- Other network interruptions (ISP, Carriers, equipment failures, etc)
Business Continuity Features
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery features that are included in Evolve IP’s Call Center product:
1 – Schedule Features
Business Continuity (BC) through pre-defined Call Forward Always (CFA) rules and Time Schedules. Disasters will occur and Customers who want to have BC in place can use the Evolve IP OSSmosis portal to be ready for such events. The goal of BC call forwarding is to move calls to unaffected agents or locations. Having BC programming in place will make it easy to forward calls during the disaster and then later return calls to normal destinations. See the Best Practice Guide below for more.
2 – Queue Features
| Feature | Agent License Type | Definition |
| Stranded | Standard, Premium | Allows configuration for ACD calls that are in a call center queue or presented to a queue when it is unstaffed (no agents are signed in) |
| Stranded – Unavailable | Standard, Premium | Allows configuration of specific routing behavior for calls stranded in a staffed queue when all agents are unavailable |
| Forced Forwarding | Standard, Premium | Allows ACD calls to be temporarily diverted to a configured destination. The policy can be configured to play an announcement prior to proceeding with the forward. |
| Manual Night Service | Premium | Allows the Supervisor or Administrator to override the Time Schedule of the queue and manually initiate the queue’s Night Service, prompting new calls intended for the call center queue to be handled via routing pre-configured in Night Service. A specific announcement can be configured for the Manual Night Service override. |
3 – Agent Features
| Feature | PBX License Type | Definition |
| Anywhere | Premium | Allows users to define one or more phone numbers or network locations (soft clients or other applications) that can be used as extensions to your profile. Calls are delivered to all phone numbers or locations that are enabled in the user’s Anywhere profile. |
| Remote Office | Premium | Allows use of a home phone, cell phone or any other 10-digit phone number as your business phone. This feature redirects all calls coming to your business phone to the remote office phone. |
BEST PRACTICE: Remote Office and Contact Center Agents working via their Mobile Phone
Utilizing the Remote Office feature to route contact center calls to Agents via mobile phones is a quick way to activate business continuity. However, there are a few "gotchas" introduced in this scenario that could result in contact center calls being routed to the mobile phone's voicemail. For most contact centers, routing callers to the Agent's personal voicemail would be highly undesirable. The following scenarios should be understood and discussed with your agents to prevent this situation.
- if the mobile phone is out of coverage, the caller will route to the mobile phone's voicemail
- if the agent is Ready / Available and doesn't answer the call in less than the number of "rings" configured on their wireless carrier's voicemail settings, the caller will route to the mobile phone's voicemail
- if the agent "rejects" the call on their mobile phone, the caller will route to the mobile phone's voicemail
Resources
The Call Center Continuity – Best Practices Guide is meant to provide customers with definitions and use cases for Call Center Continuity and DR features that are provided as part of Evolve IP’s Call Center product. This guide is not meant to serve as a default process document, but instead as an informational overview of how features perform and common use cases where they are important.