Establishing an AI-Based Disaster Recovery Plan for Contact Center Continuity
The past few years have served as a reminder to always expect the unexpected—whether it's a pandemic that turns your team into a remote workforce practically overnight, a natural disaster that shutters your business, or just simple surprises like service outages, staffing shortages, and IT blunders.
Whatever happens, maintaining continuity in contact center operations is mission-critical. With an AI-based disaster recovery plan, you are prepared to mitigate any damage to your business and your overall customer experience.
Let's explore what a contact center disaster recovery plan should do, what needs to be included in the plan, and how artificial intelligence (AI) plays a crucial role.
What Does a Disaster Recovery Plan Do?
The main purpose of any contact center is to offer customers a simple, accessible way to contact your business. You can't accomplish this mission effectively if:
Customers can't reach your organization
Employees can't work, leaving you with an insufficient number of agents
Office space is unusable or inaccessible
Employees can't access communications technology and/or customer data
Call volume spikes beyond your team's capacity
A disaster recovery plan prepares your business to react in these scenarios to minimize the impact on your bottom line, company reputation, and overall customer experience. The plan includes policies, procedures, and tools that enable your team to get back to work quickly after an interruption and keep your customers satisfied along the way.
Traditional disaster recovery services and business continuity planning can be expensive and time-consuming. Fortunately, advances in cloud communications and automation offer a better way to ensure contact center continuity with disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). An AI-based disaster recovery plan for contact centers is easier to implement, more cost-effective, and results in less operational downtime.
What Should Be Included in a Disaster Recovery Plan?
A contact center disaster recovery plan outlines what your company needs to do in case of an emergency. It includes a checklist of critical IT systems and networks—including your phone system, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and other key tools needed to serve customers. It also outlines the steps that need to be taken to restart or recover those tools, as well as security measures to protect sensitive data during these times.
An effective contact center disaster recovery plan also includes information for each team and role, outlining what everyone should do in different scenarios. What's the plan if they can't get to the office? What should they do if the power or internet goes out? What does IT need to focus on first in case of an emergency?
What Is an AI-Powered Contact Center Business Continuity Plan?
In the event of an emergency, your team will need time to implement the disaster recovery plan and quickly get back up to speed. Meanwhile, inbound calls to your contact center can instantly be rerouted and answered by a custom-made, AI-powered contact center agent. This virtual representative can answer multiple calls simultaneously, easily handling any volume of calls, even during massive call surges. The agent speaks in natural language and is trained to suit your business and your customers' needs; therefore, your customers will be able to get the information and resolutions they need efficiently.
Your virtual agent can be directly integrated into your company's CRM and other communications infrastructure, allowing a seamless transition between your DRaaS plan and your regular, day-to-day contact center operations.
What Are the Benefits of Using AI for Business Continuity?
An AI-powered virtual agent can be an effective fallback option during an emergency, giving your organization a secondary infrastructure while focusing on repairing your primary infrastructure and contact center. This keeps your customers feeling connected and cared for at all times.
A virtual assistant emergency solution can be created instantly from a user-friendly platform that doesn’t require software developers. Once it's built, you can use it anywhere and anytime your human agents need backup, whether there's a disaster or just a massive call spike that could otherwise paralyze your business and frustrate your customers.
By decreasing your dependency on human agents, you increase operational efficiency and improve the customer experience with guaranteed 24/7 support. Customers don't have to wait in queues, and as human agents become available, virtual agents can pass customers off to the most appropriate live representative as needed.
This way, your business doesn't lose money due to downtime, and you don't have to spend money implementing an expensive traditional disaster recovery service. Best of all, your business can adapt to any challenging situation on the fly, with no fear of losing customers or sales.
Next Steps
After discussing your business continuity needs with a Vonage AI account manager, the team will create a scalable AI contact center agent, fully customized for your unique business. Your virtual assistant quickly and easily integrates into your business phone system and CRM and can be activated at any time.
Find out which AI-based disaster recovery plan will best suit your needs by speaking with a Vonage AI representative today.
Vonage provides AI virtual assistants for standalone applications as well as those integrated into its contact center and unified communications offerings.
