Disaster Recovery and Continuity Planning

Introduction

To maintain contact with callers during an emergency situation is an important consideration for any business. For many, their inbound telephony numbers are integral to their disaster recovery plan. A network based plan provides a service that is secure, flexible and controllable. It can be implemented from a single phone call within minutes, from anywhere in the world. All that is required is to input a customer account code and password and then the routing plan number that is required. It is also just as easy to revert back to your default plan.

Research suggests advertising responses increase by between 50% and 300% when a Freephone number is used.

Considerations

Different scenarios - Types of emergency situation that may prevent access to your premises may be: total destruction of the building, no access due to a security alert, or flooding of a comms room, public or private network failure, staff shortages due to illness or adverse weather conditions

Business Impact - Loss of business, Customer retention and impact on customer service

Importance of calls - It is important to understand and prioritise the various types of incoming call. For example, a business might decide that only new sales calls are to be dealt with and callers with account queries can be given a message and called back at a later date.

Requirements - In order to implement a successful Disaster Recovery Plan, the following parameters must be assessed, and suitable provision put in place. For example does your business have an existing alternative answering capability? What answering capability is required? This will be based on factors such as the number of simultaneous calls to be handled and the skill levels of staff required to handle calls.

Costs - Is the cost of a DR solution justifiable.

Solution

ITC can work with any company to write a routing plan for their non geographic number that meets their business needs in any given situation.

The plan will have a set of standard parameters, i.e.:

Destinations for;

During office hours

Outside office hours

Divert options (for example - after ringing for 20 seconds, divert to xxx)

Alternative delivery numbers (for example - another office or location used for disaster recovery.)

A number of alternative scenarios can be included and each scenario can have different routing instructions for each number in the plan.

It is a simple process to identify the requirements for inbound routing and the specific options required as standard, along with the alternative routing options that may be envisaged in an emergency situation if, for example, your offices are not accessible for any reason.