call center business continuity plan

[kah042]

Have a recovery plan, but have a question from an operations perspective. What parameters do you use to determine when to "flip the switch" and implement the "plan"?

[Charles Alvear]

For my team, our business continuity plan is typically called in to effect due to poor weather conditions. Basically, our HR dept determines if the office will be shut down due to hazardous road conditions (as a result of bad weather). When this happens, we call our continuity plan into effect which involves having agents work from home.

The majority of our agents participate in a weekly work-from-home plan whereby they connect to our phone system (and CRM) from home and field live calls and do their normal day-to-day work. This way we never need to re-train the staff on our continuity plan. We just notify the team at home via instant message to inform them, "OK, the building is closed, everyone work from home today. We'll let you know when it's safe to return to work."