The East Coast of the US has been extremely lucky. The earthquake which hit Washington on the 23^rd August reached 5.8 on the Richter scale and was felt from North Carolina to New England. Luckily the impact caused minimal damage, but a more powerful quake could have broken both telecoms and power cables and dislodged essential telecoms circuits, according to telecoms business continuity experts at GemaTech. If Hurricane Irene had hit the East Coast with more power, severe flooding would have compounded the problem, making it impossible to reconnect circuits quickly. Thirdly factor-in a Verizon workforce strike (which did in fact occur on the 7^th August and lasted for some two weeks) and there would have been no-one available to get any broken telecoms circuits back up and running anyway. The perfect storm of these three events coinciding could have been a major disaster for any organisation which has inadequate, or indeed no, telecoms resilience plan. And there are no guarantees such a scenario could not still happen at some point in the future. Eventually luck will run out…

Just think what the impact would be on a business if their telecoms circuits failed, if employees were denied access to their offices or if the transport system was out of action. How long would it take the city and telecoms carriers to repair and restore normal service? If buildings were severely damaged or waterlogged it would take major resources to rebuild infrastructure, and if lots of customers are in the same situation a carrier is going to be inundated with work – all at top priority.

Specialist telecoms technology company GemaTech (carrier compatible providers of telecoms business continuity services) understands that telecommunications is the engine of any organisation. It connects a business with its customers and suppliers, and enables all communication via voice and data. When that infrastructure is disrupted, the ability to continue operating as a business is compromised and money is lost fast. After all how many US businesses can continue operating effectively when they have no ability to communicate with their customers?

But protecting your business telecoms doesn’t have to be expensive. For just the price of a cup of coffee a day, an individual number can be re-routed safely and securely from one office location to another, a cell phone or a home phone, enabling an employee to continue receiving those mission critical inbound calls by working from somewhere else. GemaTech have been delivering proven business telecoms resilience, which can be activated within a few minutes following a disruption, to blue chip organisations in the US and UK for many years, and is relied upon in times of telecoms failure by organisations in various industry sectors where telecoms is mission critical including hospitals and investment banks.

One day luck will run out, and those businesses left unprepared risk losing everything. But, for those who have prepared for the worst (for the sacrifice of a few cups of coffee!) the COO can sleep safe in the knowledge that it can be business as usual even if earthquake, hurricane and telecoms strikes create the ‘perfect storm’.

For further information on GemaTech’s product portfolio contact Karen Jones, Marketing Manager

New, emerging speech analytics technology can help any organisation, and in particular highly regulated banks, be in a position to know exactly what is being said, or sold, during or straight after every phone call handled by their call centre agents.

Analysing all calls as they are occurring gives supervisors the ability to identify errors or omissions and help agents rectify calls to protect the customer, and at the same time save the company millions in regulatory fines or customer compensation.

New Live Speech Analytics can identify miss-selling – innocent or otherwise

Speech analytics solutions have been around for a number of years, providing post-call trend analysis for call centres. Due to limitations in processing speed and prohibitive costs, only a selection of all voice recordings were actually analysed to provide valuable insight into customer and agent behaviour.

Now a new generation of speech analytics technology is emerging via specialist vendors which is taking ‘first call resolution’ to the next level, enabling companies to avoid any risk of miss-selling earlier, to recover quickly from mistakes, or at worst detect them. New speech analytics solutions include the ability to analyse every call as it is happening, in turn triggering live prompts to an agent’s or supervisor’s screen. Any keyword or phrase can be searched for. Any question and answer combination can be used as a trigger to prompt an agent to change the course of their conversation during a call. And all the time supervisors can see a real-time picture of what is being said in their call centre without having to physically listen to calls. Future enhancements will even see speech analytics identifying different customer emotions, giving supervisors the ability to flag up angry or distressed customers or agents in real-time.

Applying new live speech analytics technology could have helped identify the most inappropriate sales of PPI, giving agents the chance to rectify a miss-sell, thus saving the banks an embarrassing apology and hundreds of million of pounds worth of pay-outs.

Yesterday Barclays, HSBC and RBS (via the BBA, British Bankers Association) followed Lloyds’ example and chose to back down in their legal fight over the miss-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI). The insurance policies are designed to pay out for customers who have been made redundant, or are on long term sick leave in order to cover mortgage, loan or credit card payments. However the self- employed can never be made redundant and those with existing health issues are not necessarily eligible for policy redemption claimed due to extended sick leave.

Compliance is paramount in avoiding fines and compensation

Miss-selling is just one of the many issues around compliance affecting banks, insurance companies and financial enterprises today. Such companies need to demonstrate to the Financial Services Authority (FSA) that they are trading compliantly including voice recording calls made and received over traditional landlines, and in some cases mobile phones. Live speech analytics can ensure 100% compliance on every phone call handled by every call centre agent in a cost effective way that does not require expensive professional services or costly integration with existing voice recording equipment. Indeed the Return on Investment (ROI) of deploying such a solution can be realised, in some cases, in less than a year!

For more information on next generation live speech analytics and how it can help save your company millions of pounds, contact GemaTech on 0845 345 3333 or visit our website at www.gematech.com.

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.

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.

The UK’s annual transport budget will be £13.6bn according to George Osborne’s recent Public Spending Review. The amount of current spending will be cut by 21% and capital spending will be down 11%.

Even though London’s Crossrail project will go ahead ,and £30bn is to be set aside for capital spending, including £500m for Tyne and Wear Metro and Tees Valley bus network, there will be a rise in regulated cap on rail fares to 3% above inflation for three years from 2012.

The logical conclusion is that rail fares will probably be going up in years to come rather than down. Couple this with the fact that it is projected that the average middle class family will be £10k worse off every year, the number of people willing to commute by train to work every day is bound to decrease. Now it maybe that those people choose to get back in their cars, move closer to work, or change jobs to be closer to home, but surely with the increase in demand for flexible and remote working we will begin to see organisations wising up to the fact that they need to provide this as a necessity not as a perk?

Rather than the IT or Telecoms departments pushing for this, I would imagine that line managers, BC and HR managers would be the key drivers behind a move to more flexible ways of working as they really are the key stakeholders: the line managers and HR want to be able to ‘bag’ the best employee candidates and the Business Continuity manager needs to ensure that in the event of a business disruption (power cut, telephone outage, flood, fire etc.) the organisation can continue to function to the best of its ability.

Overarching all this the CEO should be fully behind this initiative. After all what CEO doesn’t want to recruit the best people, reduce overheads, maximise productivity and protect brand reputation when things go wrong?

No-one can look at the state of our country and deny that something needs to be done to save money, so I sincerely hope savvy business leaders out there can turn these cuts into major growth opportunities by enabling more of their employees to work remotely from home now and again…

However upon a backlash on Twitter from fans of the Gap, the company backed down and reverted back to the original design within the space of a day.

Now either the gap really are not strong enough to stand by their convictions, or the power of the consumer is truly surpassing all previous records!

What this plainly shows is the vulnerability of company reputations in a new age when customers can air their views very publicly and very quickly. Companies must be sharp enough to a) include customers in their plans, products and processes in order to manage their expectations and b) protect their reputation more fiercely than ever. Indeed this is actually good for the consumer because companies will no longer be able to ‘get away’ with shoddy service without paying the bad PR consequences.

Communication is key, and protecting the lines of communication between company and consumer is more important than ever, be that online or by phone.

But was Gap right to back down to social media pressure or should they have whethered the storm? Let me know your views…

Through this inquest and these types of tragedies both government authorities and private sector businesses can assess their continuity and disaster recovery plans in order to improve them for future threats.

The Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the Cabinet Office have produced an interim guide towards achieving resilient telecommunications. The focus is clearly on highlighting the issues raised by the 7/7 bombings as the following extract illustrates:

“The response to the incidents in London on 7th July, 2005, by the media, public and emergency services resulted in increased demand for both fixed and mobile communications. In London, demand for use of the GSM (note 1) mobile networks greatly exceeded capacity and callers experienced difficulty in making and receiving calls for a few hours after the incident. This exposed some shortfalls in arrangements for those with a need for resilient communications. Although July 7 highlighted issues surrounding GSM-based communications, severe degradation or failure of telecommunications have been cited as a major concern underlying the response to many incidents including: the flooding in Boscastle (August, 2004) and Carlisle (January, 2005), and in the USA following hurricane Katrina (August, 2005).”

The lesson to be learned from the 7/7 bombings was that both emergency services and businesses alike should not be placing so much reliance on the GSM network for telecoms during an incident.

The interim guidance document clearly showed that:

“In and around London on 7 July by around 11:00 users of GSM public land mobile networks (PLMNs) were experiencing considerable difficulty in making and receiving voice calls and SMS messages( note 2). On the fixed-line public switched telephone network (PSTN), although the number of calls attempted doubled, callers did not experience the same degree of difficulties. This is due to the fixed network having, in general, greater capacity than mobile networks.”

So are emergency services and businesses implementing a robust PSTN based telecoms resilience strategy? I think the jury is still out on that one, but let it be known that the warnings have been made and the lessons have been taken to be learned from, so in theory anyone caught short in the future should have no excuses.

Two further strikes are planned for November unless talks can resolve the dispute.

If you are a London based business how do your business continuity plans stand up to tube strikes or minor transport disruptions? I am sure that many are completely adequate for major and long term disruptions to tube, buses and road networks, but how do they cope with minor disruptions which could be more frequent?

The amount of work hours and productivity wasted because employees are delayed in getting into the office can start to mount up over weeks and months.

The solution
It would have been so easy for an organisation to send out an sms text message or recorded voice message to those employees who normally commute, on Sunday evening, teliing them of the impending strike and asking them to work from home. Yet I wonder how many organisations were equipped, or even chose to do this?

Are you based in the city? What plans did you implement to ensure business continuity, knowing on Sunday evening that the tube strike was well underway?