Backup Call Center 101: How Can Their Services Help Your Business Continuity Plan?

What does your company do in the event of an emergency or even an anticipated event that leaves your business needing coverage? Do you have a business continuity plan in place with crucial elements like a backup call center to keep things running?

If you’re wondering what a continuity plan is and how to create it, chances are you need one! This process ensures your business can keep operating if a disaster or disruption occurs by protecting and preparing your employees and assets. Disruptions can include everything from a natural disaster to a cybersecurity breach to a planned event that takes the whole team out of the office.

Without prevention and planning, these disruptions can literally cost a company everything. Statista found that 9.1% of American business owners sold, shut down, or stopped being responsible for their business in 2022. It’s no surprise how the pandemic continues to affect many organizations globally.

To protect your organization, your business continuity planning steps may include: 

• Conducting a business impact analysis: Identify risks in each area of your business and prioritize accordingly.
• Building a business continuity team: Appoint and train individuals from relevant departments to create and manage the continuity plan. 
• Hiring more employees: You may need to expand your team to ensure coverage during events and emergencies, which means higher costs.
• Establishing recovery steps: Define how your company will recover critical data and functions, maintain communication, handle liabilities, and find alternative vendors—just to name a few!
• Test, review, and refine: Once you develop a plan, you should test as many elements ahead of time as possible, from running drills with employees to testing IT procedures and system recoveries. This helps you continue improving and preparing for even the most extreme scenarios.

Businesses that do this independently have their work cut out for them, especially those with lean teams. But the right backup call center will take much of this burden off your team, saving you significant time and money!

Have You Ever Thought About These Emergency Situations?

You can hope for the best, but are you prepared for the worst? While creating your company’s continuity plan, consider several types of emergencies that could interrupt your business regardless of your industry, including:

• Natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, fires, and power outages
• Ransomware attacks, which can put both your company and customers at risk
• Pandemics like the coronavirus, which can drastically decrease your workforce
• Global and political events and economic turmoil
• Events that cause customer service surges (and potential outages), like product launches or holidays

Here are a few scenarios in more detail.

Cybersecurity Breaches

Consider cybersecurity attacks: Two out of three midsize businesses have been victims of a ransomware attack in the last 18 months. And this downtime comes at a steep cost—an average of $1,410 per minute, in fact!

However, you’ll have one less major issue to worry about when you have an emergency backup call center you can rely on. They can provide continuity in your customer service without the high expense of hiring and training more personnel just for short-term scenarios. 

Seasonal Surges

Perhaps you’re dealing with the holiday shopping craze and need additional support to continue delivering prompt and friendly customer service. Or maybe you’re facing a more serious issue, like a ransomware attack or hardware malfunction, and you need to calm client concerns. Your backup call center will help you keep customers happy, even in the direst of circumstances, since they’re well-versed in your:

• Systems and processes (they’ll have access to your CRM even if you don’t!)
• Products or services
• Brand and customer service experience

Company Events and Operational Changes

Your sales team has an exciting opportunity to go to a national conference, where they could meet prospective partners and clients.

Sounds great, right? Until you wonder…who will be left to cover sales calls?

Emergencies aren’t the only events that can disrupt your business continuity and customer service experience. Anticipated events like special occasions and shifts in company operations can also leave you short-handed if you don’t plan ahead, such as:

• Switching to new systems (e.g., client relationship management [CRM] or enterprise resource planning [ERP] platform)—which can take up more of your team’s time
• Coverage for weekends, evenings, holidays, and increased call-outs
• Downtime due to training delays
• Business trips (e.g., conferences, retreats, off-site training)
• Successions, mergers, and acquisitions

You and your employees should be able to enjoy the flexibility of these different opportunities and time out of the office without coverage concerns. And if you can plan and budget for these anticipated situations, why not invest in a backup call center? They can help you in these times of need, even going above and beyond.
For example, an experienced outsourced call center might support your sales team while at a trade show by conducting real-time lead follow-up. All you have to do is send them your list of prospects at the end of each day, and they’ll reach out the very next day to start fostering those budding relationships!

Benefits of a Business Continuity Plan

When you follow through business continuity plan steps, your company can handle all foreseen and unforeseen events without disruption! Part of this is partnering with a reliable backup call center. A tried and tested continuity plan will empower your business to:

• Maintain business operations during an incident—whether emergency or anticipated
• Shorten downtimes following disruptions
• Mitigate expenses and risks due to revenue loss, compliance oversight, and productivity loss
• Build and maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty—and, therefore, your company reputation!

With the level of hackers and ransomware today’s business owners face, you can never be too secure. While 96% of companies with a trusted backup and disaster recovery plan manage to survive ransomware attacks, 93% without a plan who suffered an attack are out of business within one year.

Plan First, Thank Yourself—Always

So, could a service disruption happen to you? Yes—companies of all shapes and sizes can be hit. According to a survey highlighted by DataCore, 54% of businesses reported a downtime incident that lasted at least eight hours in the past five years. 

As for security breaches, 28% of them affect SMBs. Why the “little guys”? Unfortunately, cyber attackers know that small businesses tend to have weaker cybersecurity than large corporations. And when it comes to natural disasters, there are too many things outside your control. 

These are just a few examples of why preparing with a thorough business continuity plan is vital! Your business can do this on its own, coming up with all the components of a business continuity plan…

Or, you can entrust a large portion of the responsibility to a backup call center, saving your company significant time and money and allowing your employees to focus on their core competencies when it matters most.
Contact us today to learn more about Chameleon’s disaster preparedness coverage services. Our team will gladly support yours during even the most challenging times.