Now is the best time to  re-enforce the necessity of having your business telecoms continuity plans in order. So here are my top 3 tips for being prepared:

1. Ensure you have an easy-to-use emergency mass notification solution to communicate with employees when under pressure

One of the first rules in managing a disaster situation has to be communicate, communicate, communicate. Your employees need to be confident that they are doing the right thing during an emergency and that you as a business have their safety interests at heart. In a matter of minutes you can direct your employees to stay put or evacuate, tell them the severity of a situation or whether they simply need to find another place to work. The key features you need to look out for include:

Ease of use - it’s your responsibility to send out an alert to your company. Chaos and confusion is happening around you and yet you have a job to do. The simpler the system, the better for you. Just a few clicks and you can reach all the right people with the right message via the most appropriate media: SMS text, email, voicemail, web status page, even Facebook or Twitter.

Accessibility - if your mass notification system can only be accessed on a company’s internal network or static computer, you could be screwed! Secure web access is the only reliable way to know that you can access your contacts and system from anywhere with an internet connection.

Flexibility – you are investing a substantial amount of money into purchasing a mass notification solution, and situations like 9/11 do not happen every day, therefore invest in a flexible solution which can be used for loyalty marketing purposes or distributing company information when not needed for crisis communication.

Visibility of costs – ok so you have invested in a solution, now each time you send an alert you incur costs – but do you know how much? Choose a solution which enables you to know exactly what you are spending and where.

2. Ensure that all your incoming phone calls can still be answered

Think of this scenario: If your offices were a few blocks away from the World Trade Center in the days following the disaster, your employees were all safe but your building was unusable due to extensive dust, how do you ensure your business continues ticking over and doesn’t become an indirect casualty of the situation? The answer is enabling your employees wherever possible to continue working to some degree and that means having incoming phone calls re-directed to other landline or cell phones in safe locations such as home or remote office.

Many blue chip organisations may choose to send their employees to a workplace recovery site which is specifically designed for such situations with desks, pc’s and phones waiting to be used. But how many calls are directed at individual direct in dial numbers? Hundreds? Thousands? Some recovery sites will simply transfer all calls to one number that can be then distributed to the appropriate person. The time delay this incurs can be costly as callers wait for the right person to be tracked down. Wouldn’t it be better if callers rang the regular DID number of the person they need to speak with and then get through to them instantly as if they were still in their main office? Check out your telecoms continuity plan and see how seamless it really is in such a situation…

3. Voice record re-routed phone calls

The benefit of continuing to voice record phone calls  during and after an office evacuation or major disruption, is that you can assess the behaviour and actions of employees during the crisis. It can help in providing evidence of who said what to whom and it can help in planning for future unexpected events, enabling you to brief or train individuals and departments as needed. Of course under less critical circumstances voice recording phone calls is the best way of ‘covering your corporate back’ and what’s more consumers are accepting the fact that most calls are recorded all the time now.

Business Flexibility is the key to surviving a major crisis like 9/11. Enabling employees to carry on working during and after the disruption should help ensure that your business doesn’t become a permanent casualty of the situation.

When it comes to technology there are plenty of systems that could potentially go wrong, however I wonder if businesses in the vicinty of the Olympic sites are going to be as equally prepared? Power cuts, telecoms failure and exclusion zones which may prevent employees from being able to get into their offices could all bring massive disruption to their daily operations.

Business continuity plans are not a nice to have, but a necessity in today’s competitive age, and should cover all eventualitites including one-off events like the Olympics, and newer natural disruptions such as Icelandic volcanic ash. Potential disruptions are constantly changing and evolving with the change in our climate and in the way we do business.

Flexible working practices are increasing but still not as fast as you would expect. The cultural problem of presenteesim is a hard barrier to break down, but as technology continues to improve we can but hope that organisations will see that the benefits will far outweigh any fear of losing managerial control, both in everyday operations and more importantly in times of business disruption.

Speaking at the Public Sector Efficiency Expo on Wednesday, Socitm President, Jos Creese highlighted the gulf between the public and private sectors attitude towards home working when he said that although remote working practices were ‘standard’ in the private sector, councils and the public sector were ‘not doing enough of this’. He said: ‘There is always the chance for employees to work at home. Security concerns have stopped this, but there needs to be a way around it.’

Well to answer his question, there are many ways around these security concerns and the availability of enabling IT and Telecoms technology is growing exponentially, because remote working is a no-brainer way of reducing ongoing operational costs.

Virtual Contact Centre
Building a contact centre does not automatically mean occupying a building with as many agents as you can cram in. Build a virtual contact centre from home workers and you have a fully scalabe, resilient workforce of agents selected from a far wider geographic and demographic pool of employees.

Call Analytics
Monitoring every call handled by every agent would be the ultimate goal in managing remotely based call agents. This is now possible with live call analytics. And not just monitoring calls but being able to actively prompt call agents while they are on the phone with a customer or potential customer, thereby decreasing the cost per call and increasing operational efficiency.

Voice Recording
Hand in hand with call monitoring, voice recording calls handled by contact centre agents is widely accepted, not only for quality and training purposes, but perhaps more importantly for resolving disputes with customers quickly and easily. Voice recording is not just confined to onsite contact centres, it can easily be deployed for remotely based agents as well.

Mass Notification
Keeping in touch with home or remote workers is a vital means of maintaining staff morale and team spirit. Communication from senior management is vital if team members are to be kept informed of company news, and there are so many ways this can be achieved. Using a mass notification tool is a fast and cost effective way of sending messages via SMS, email, web page, voice recording, fax and even social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Audio Conferencing
Perhaps one of the most widely adopted remote working technologies, second only to being able to access the company LAN via a secure VPN connection, audio conferencing is a simple and easy way to conduct meetings where participants can be situated in any geographic location.

Video Conferencing
A relatively new technology video conferencing is a more expensive option, but a fantastic way for multinational organisations to connect their employees from around the globe. Telepresence from Cisco has pushed the boundaries to provide an extremely realist representation of a board room setting. As remote working increases and costs of solutions come down, I believe video conferencing will notlong be on a par with audio conferencing in terms of take-up.

Intranet, Email and Instant Messaging
Finally the methods for communicating between employees and management are tried, tested and used everyday and there are no technological barriers for employees to be able to access company systems and information securely from home using a broadband connection. It is simply a matter of changing management perceptions of working from home.

Deploying any, or all of these solutions enables employees whose jobs can be performed anywhere to save money on commuting, as well as enabling their organisation to be more efficient, which as I am sure you will agree, is welcomed in such a fragile economy as ours.

In terms of business we need to be stepping up our disaster recovery and business continuity plans to be able to cope with all manner of disruptive situations. Not just for the possibility that we may be at the centre of such a devastating occurance, but also for when we may be also affected on the periphery. Indeed the west coast of America was bracing itself for the fall out of last week’s earthquake and tsunami as the ripples were felt along the coast. Luckily the anticipated flooding did not occur, but I am sure that many west coast corporations were dusting off their business continuity plans just in case.

For those organisations taking another look at their DR plans, it would be prudent not to skim over the all important telecoms continuity plans. Had buidlings needed to be evacuated, how many employees would have been able to continue working from home or other safe location, including being able to have their incoming calls re-directed?

When employees are safe, the next big role for an organisation found in disruptive circumstances is to keep on working. As the clean up operation begins across Japan, many organisations will be keen to get back to normal as soon as they can to protect their business and their country’s economy in order to fund the rebuilding of both lives, towns and infrastructure. They must support the survivors who have no choice but to rebuild their homes, restart their lives and return to work.

When will the UK’s public sector start acting upon the information they already have available to them to save money, now? Public Sector property running costs could be substantially reduced making real savings today! Not tomorrow or next year. IT and Telecoms solutions are evolving repidly and cloud-based pay as you go technology can deliver savings now. But all we hear is talk, and all we see is in-action.

As Matthew Hancock MP highlighted on Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning, UK Local Councils own £250bn worth of property across the country. Property and services which could be merged to save millions of pounds. Suffolk County Council has shown others the way by merging council services into one single, public sector estate to deliver £1.6m in savings. Isn’t that proof enough that this works?

Cloud-based, pay-as-you-use technology GemaTech is generating ever more opportunities to make IT and telecoms systems work harder on a pay-as-you-use basis, and the savvy few among our government know that they can save money and build a resilient infrastructure at the same time.

It’s simple. Just enable your employees to take advantage of more flexible working practices to work at any time and in any place in the same way as if they are in the office. Work is something you should be measured by in terms of key performance indicators, customer satisfaction levels and output, not on the amount of hours you spend in an office. You can replicate all your office based services anywhere by re-routing both voice and data via rapidly increasing technological solutions, including enabling staff to take their incoming calls on any phone. Does the general public really care where they are calling? Isn’t it far more important to them that their call is answered quickly and efficiently without the need for call backs to meet their needs? Why not have your call centre staff working closer to home or even from home? It’s cheaper, it’s resilient and the solution is quite obvious.

But how can you effectively manage staff who work remotely?

Voice recording of all calls is a standard feature of call centre and business operations today and with the increasing availability of cloud-based services they cost even less because you only pay for what you use. Such evolving solutions make it even easier to invest in features that help manage your staff remotely. Like it or not cloud services are here now, and will be even more prevalent tomorrow.

Several large private sector organisations have already experimented with tools such as speech analytics, though the first generation of such technology turned out to be a rather expensive luxury at the time. Things have changed radically. In contrast to, and for a fraction of the cost of first generation speech analytics you can now monitor ‘live’, every call your employees make or receive, and even interact with those calls to ensure every agent says what they are supposed to before putting the phone down. In fact you could probably even manage your employees or call centre agents remotely far better than if they are sat in your office.

A new Public Sector Efficiency Expo and exhibition is being held at the London Business Design Centre on 16th March. I really don’t want to hear, as I so often do at these conferences, what central government is recommending local councils and other organisations ‘might like to think about or considering doing, at some point in the future’. I want to hear ‘Why this council did this – how they saved this amount of money – and here’s how you do it – please go and try it yourselves.’ Now is the time where affordable, emerging cloud-based technology can save organisations tens of thousands of pounds every year in call costs alone. Have you considered how much money is tied up in your IT and Telecoms infrastructure which could be more intelligently re-allocated, without affecting your everyday operations?

Come on people let’s get geared up for radical change and take a leaf from those in the Middle East where people power is starting to make a difference. Let’s stop talking and let’s start acting so that we can get this economy back on track.

Travel Costs, how much more can the employee pay?
Employees who commute for work may soon be spending between 10 and 20% of their salary just to get to work, travel season tickets are scheduled to rise by an average of 5.8% and London bus and tube fares by 6.8%, some commuters in Kent will be hit with nearly a 13% rise. UK disposable income is being threatened, as the ‘squeezed middle’ gets strangled with bigger VAT and income tax hikes, at what point does it become non cost effective to stay with their current employer and look for local or more flexible employment?

Flexible working – Home working:
Flexible working would reduce travel related costs dramatically and incentivise staff to stay with their current employer, 2.2m people in the UK now work in some form and benefit from, Flexible working.

Business Benefits:
More business’s should look to see how flexible working can benefit them financially, with the advent of cloud-based pay-as-you-use technology, these solutions are now very cost effective, powerful and secure, enabling voice and data to be routed to wherever the worker is located, whether at home, remote office, train, motorway service station or coffee shop.

Implementing a flexible working approach saves your business money because you can make your office space work harder. Fewer permanently desk-based staff means fewer desks, equipment and reductions in your utility, maintenance and security bills.

Cloud Based Technology:
Use of cloud-based technology is definitely here to stay as the cost efficiencies of using managed services for IT and telecoms are beginning to outweigh any reservations over security in the minds of CTOs across the UK. State of the art data centres fed by superfast broadband, designed for maximum resilience and security are beginning to replace more vulnerable, office based sever rooms.

From these data centres phone calls can be routed to wherever the employee is located, opening a far wider range of opportunities for virtual contact centres that can be run at a fraction of the cost of office based operations. New Agent monitoring and call analytics deliver management and control at a cheaper price than you would expect using faster, easier to use technology.

UK based Specialist Technology company GemaTech has already delivered one travel consultancy customer with a completely virtual contact centre operation and is launching next generation Agent monitoring and Call Analytic modules to enhance their cloud-based managed service solutions for voice recording, call re-routing and business continuity.

GemaTech are, on the one hand, continuing to develop pay-as-you-use cloud-based solutions because they understand that customer budgets are squeezed. On the other hand they can also see the opportunities for both employees and employers to benefit from cost effective flexible working practices which stop both money and people walking out of the door.

Our office was hit just before Christmas as a number of people were struck with flu, myself included. The recovery time was long and slow, but having my laptop at home meant that at least for part of the time I could keep on top of work and emails when I felt up to it. For many people this type of flexible working is still not an option which amazes me. It has been proven time and again that those people who are enabled to work from home take fewer sick days than those who are office based.

For those businesses who do have a flexible working plan which involves re-routing incoming phone calls, I hope that they have been kept up to date, after all what often happens is that calling plans are pulled out in an emergency and numbers have changed as employees have moved on…

Around 740 faults were reported in the Chesterfield area as BT engineers are desparately trying to replace 400m of cabling to restore service.

Every week I issue a news round up, to a number of email subscribers, of stories which affect business continuity in a variety of different ways, be they fires, floods and more often than not, cut or stolen cables. There’s a never ending supply of reasons why businesses may not be able to continue operating because employees cannot get to their phones, or the phone service has been cut off.

Some of the more interesting stories I have uncovered in the past include:
– A tube station being closed due to an ‘unusual smell’ which caused delays for people getting into work.
– Rising cost of travel which has the knock on effect of more people wanting to work from home.
– An airbase being evacuated as a live missle was delivered in the post.
– Numerous power cuts across the UK cause chaos to businesses as phone lines are inevitably affected at the same time.

And week after week, as the resell value of copper continues to rise, thieves are being chased or caught in connection with copper cabling being stolen – either phone cabling or railway signal cabling.

All of these business disruptions mean that to some extent phones can’t be answered, but by re-routing calls at your local serving exchange to mobile phones or home phone lines, businesses can carry on being open to customers, by simply working round the problem.

According to a recent study by Vodafone, UK businesses are losing contracts because they cannot be reached fast enough by potential customers.

The cost, according to the survey, can mount up to around £30,000 per company and therefore can equate to an estimated £70bn potential losses across the country.

The Problem
Over the past year, almost four in 10 businesses (39 per cent) that had cancelled a contract with a supplier, did so because of poor communication. They cited difficulty contacting key decision makers or getting a slow response to an urgent call as being the deciding factor when terminating the contract.

The Solution
There are a variety of different reasons why your employees are not answering the phone to those potential customers: it could be not enough staff to answer the number of calls you recieve, you may be experiencing a business interruption of some kind where employees are evacuated from their offices, or simply can’t get into their offices. Whatever the reason, it is simple enough to re-route incoming calls instantly and seamlessly to mobile phones, home phones or indeed any other phone in any other location. This way you have a variety of ways in which to overcome the ‘missed call’ problem.

But there is always the exception.

The norovirus is a particularly fast spreading illness which can take out a number of people in one go for over a week. I recall one year when this occured to a business I know well, where 80% of the executive board members were off sick at the same time, and the cause of these absences was not the virus in my opinion but the lack of response and sensible behaviour of the team. As soon as one of their members became ill it would have made sense for them to be isolated at home, rather than ‘putting on a brave face’ and attending a board meeting in a closed room for several hours. The result? Everyone in the room contracted the virus at the same time and were off sick simultaneously.

We tend to think that when we are healthy we will not get whatever is being passed around the office. But we all know that prevention is better than cure and that being just a little bit cautious can save a lot of time in lost productivity and ultimately revenue or customer dissatisfaction.

In our office if such an illness were to surface we could all easily work from home. Technology is designed to enable people and if it is not used to its full advantage then we are simply at the mercy of nature, be that pandemic flu, norovirus or more devastating events such as flooding or fire.