Storm season is upon us, and you know what that means: it’s time to start hurricane planning with your team and your call center to avoid the anxiety, stress, and chaos that comes with it.
With every year, there are more and more hurricanes being reported. In this blog, we discuss best practices and questions to answer ahead of the storm. How call center solutions support your business with hurricane planning to ensure your business doesn’t have to suffer. Take the time now to prepare your business to go beyond weathering the storm.
Answer these questions related to contact center solutions during storm season:
- Is your contact center ready for power outages? It is frequent, especially during larger hurricanes, to lose power and sometimes other utilities.
- What are your protocols related to down phone lines and loss of phone connectivity? Phone lines will fail during hurricanes; it is essential to understand how your partner coordinates service during these situations.
- What are your staffing protocols during emergencies? If cities are evacuated and incommutable, understand how your contact center will handle staffing.
- How are lines forwarded in case of emergency? By understanding your staffing needs and emergency protocols, your contact center can go into action when lines are disrupted, and office closures ensue.
- What is your evacuation protocol? Make sure to include notifying the contact center.
- Do you have online and cloud access to your files and calendars? Mainly related to on-call protocols during emergencies, ensure cloud access to essential files, protocols, and schedules.
- What are the redundancy protocols and backups? Make sure that your contact center has emergency protocols related to generator power and data backups.
- What are the firewall and safety protocols? Ensure that your data stays safe with your contact center partner, even if they lose power or experience flooding.
- Where is your contact center located, and do they have experience with numerous storms? At Call Experts, our office and services have never stopped. That is through Category 5 Hurricanes, freezes, floods, and more!
- Who on your team is responsible for working with the contact center? You must have direct contact with your partner to prepare for storms and ensure that everything transitions smoothly.
Best practices and call center services for hurricane planning.
Along with answering the questions above, it is essential to find a great contact center partner. Call Experts is the only contact center in the Carolinas with a gold certification for emergency and quality procedures by the Association of TeleServices International (ATSI). Our team has the experience, facilities, and protocols to support your team in times of emergencies.
A good call center team is essential during a time of crisis. For example, most businesses will experience some outage during a hurricane, whether it’s a power outage or a customer service issue. During such a time, communication with customers is critical. Here is a list of our top services for hurricane planning. We hope this can help you during your next crisis!
Never stop offering services, especially during emergencies.
Never stop providing service to your customers, even during an emergency. In today’s world, it is always business hours. You could be experiencing a hurricane on the South East coast, with clients on the North East coast trying to reach your business. Would you please not leave them hanging?
Agent training is essential to hurricane planning.
Our Experts receive top training, so we can confidently walk the walk and bring our best. The Call Experts multi-week training course teaches soft skills, customer service best practices, technology and typing training, and more. Our programs are based on individual Experts’ needs and extend beyond the classroom with up-training, leadership training, and routine quality assurance grading.
Account accessibility and dedicated account managers.
You can always access your account via the online portal and on-call scheduling platforms. In one convenient place, you can view minutes, messages, call data, and scheduling platforms. Also, every client has one dedicated account manager that grows with your company. If you have any questions or needs, you can always call this contact directly.
Overflow, Technology, and Redundancy.
When you are managing emergency on-call technicians, we can assist your business, have reached capacity, are experiencing a carrier outage, or during a severe weather event. Our experts are geographically spread out to maximize your time. In our distributed model, we will always be prepared to answer even if service is temporarily unavailable in your location or ours.
Attendance lines offer real-time Mass SMS and email notifications.
Receive call-out alerts and requests instantly. Send mass messages to all employees. Ability to notify manager lists per call-out via SMS, email, or both. Get notified through ERM integrations and the Call Experts portal. Employees can text the call-out line to receive a web-based call-out protocol and receive a confirmation. Intelligent Routing enables previous callers, identified by Caller ID, to skip identifiers and go straight to resolution.
Summary.
How can you prepare for and prepare yourself during a disaster? Of course, learning ahead of time about the latest warnings, participating in community outreach, downloading apps, and conducting your research can become a part of your routine. There are more ways than ever to stay prepared these days, including partnering with a contact center. This article focuses on essential questions you should ask yourself and best practices for call center services.
