Unfortunately the news is often filled with stories of lone gunmen on school or college campuses threatening to shoot students or as in the recent case in Norway, actually undertaking a hofrrific attack.

But for every exceptional case there are plenty of situations which go under the radar of the headlines, so these types of occurances are more common than you might expect. Having plans in place as well as effective communication tools is essential. Rapid notification solutions are perhaps the best known way of reaching lots of people fast. Using a software application to send out emails, text messages and to post messages on web status pages is a fast way of getting information to the people you need to protect e.g. students and staff. For an example of how this is used in action can I refer you to a website by the University of Texas following an incident last year. It shows how they used email, texts, website status pages and even social media to keep communicating with students.

Under stress it must be said that solutions which are easily accessible, yet secure, and more importantly easy to use are perhaps the most effective when it comes to being able to communicate fast and effectively. Finally, knowing that the messages have a guaranteed delivery mechanism is also of importance, after all you need to know that those text messages are going to get through and take network priority.

This revolution in technology is the amalgamation of the latest speech-to-text, phonetics and key phrase recognition innovations. Unlike first generation solutions, next generation speech analytics solutions do not require on-going expensive professional services and ‘training’ because it has now become intrinsic to the software.

What this means is that an agent can be handling a live call, and a discreet desktop client can indicate when the agent has spoken key phrases (or even bad phrases) during the course of the conversation. The system therefore monitors agent performance, adherence to compliance phrases and send statistics back to the call centre manager or team leader on how the agent is performing on a call by call basis.

So the live speech analytics market is gathering momentum and the choice is expanding depending upon an organisation’s objectives, be they understanding customers or monitoring agents, there is a solution for everyone.

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.

The strike was announced a couple of weeks ago, enabling parents of school children and organisations to make alternative arrangements. So I wonder how many calls will end up still be unanswered today? Clearly if the head of the school or organisation is themselves on strike it may be difficult to find someone to authorise alternative arrangements. But how about this – for those call centres where the head is still in control but has no staff – why not re-route the unanswered incoming calls to alternative outsourced call centres, or to a temporary workfrorce who can work from home, regardless of where they are located?

Business continuity still applies in strike situations so what’s your organisation’s strategy?

1. Call Recording

A necessity these days for FSA regulated call centres, voice recording of all calls handled by your call centre is not new. But the solutions available today make it difficult in deciding which supplier to use. Go with the large players and you may find the bill expensive and the systems cumbersome. Choose a smaller supplier and you may not get the support you need. My advice is that when shopping for a call recording solution ask your potential  supplier the following questions:

• Is it a scalable solution?
• Is it easy to use and fast to search and retrieve recordings?
• Does it offer a resilience option should your call centre be evacuated to a recovery site for any reason?
• Does it offer dual channel recording to isolate speaking parties?
• Does it include a satisfactory level of encryption?
• Are you getting the best value for money?

2. Call Scripting

Creation and management of your call scripts are vital to ensure that your call agents are aware of the legal necessity to make customers aware of certain information before they make a purchase.  Choose a scripting package that has the ability to raise flags at certain points to help the agent be reminded of what to say and when. Also choose a scripting package that can be easily amended at any time for all agents.

3. PCI Compliance

New PCI compliance rules mean that organisations cannot retain customer credit and debit card details whcih can then be accessed by a third party. Encryption is not enough to fulfill this requirement. There are three ways that I would strongly recommend you consider in achieving PCI compliance:

• Obviscate the conversation. This means that when call recording, the conversation relating to taking credit card details is obscured with unintelligable sounds that can not be diciphered by any listener.
• Use monotone dtmf tone. Allow the customer to enter their credit card details using their phone keypad and ensure that all that can be heard are monotone tones for each number.
• Finally consider new technology which enables the voice recording to stop as soon as the call agent clicks on the field to start inputing the credit card details on their computer screen and whcih turns the recording back on when all the financial details have been entered.

4. Live Call Analysing

The ultimate way to ensure that every call is 100% compliant is to be able to analyse every call handled by every agent as it is happening, and actively prompt the agent to say the required phrases before they put the phone down. This may seem like a far-fetched ideal but actually live call analysis is available today.

5. Business Continuity

Finally don’t forget that compliance regulations are still enforcable even if your business operations are disrupted. Therefore have you considered whether or not your incoming calls can still get through or if voice recording continues if your agents are forced to work from home, from a recovery site or on their mobile phones? Also if during peak times you allow overflow agents to work from home, do they provide a seamless service to your customers? Can they be monitored? And what contingency do you have if your outsourced call centre lets you down or suffers a disruption?

I hope you find these tips useful, if you did feel free to pass them on…

A recent article on CallCentreHelper.com by Stella Jones advocates a mix of freeform conversation in order to engage with the customer, along with scripted text to ensure legally required information is said for compliance puropses.

But how can you prevent your contact centre agents from missing out the scripted parts of the call? New Live Speech Analytics solutions have the answer. By automatically monitoring and analysing every call, if a certain phrase is not said, an alert will be sent to the agent’s desktop to remind them to follow their script. This has multiple benefits including enabling first call resolution and achieving best endeavours on compliance.

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.

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.