Snowstorms Hit The UK – How Customer Communications Can Cope in a Crisis

Snowstorms Hit The UK – How Customer Communications Can Cope in a  Crisis 

Once again weather is making the headlines – many parts of Britain have woken up to heavy snowfalls, freezing temperatures and dangerous black ice. For businesses, disruption is almost inevitable at this time of year as employees struggle to make it into work, find offices closed when they get there, or simply choose to ‘batten down the hatches’ and stick it out at home.

Keeping customer service up and running is the biggest worry for many businesses – and the pressure is often exacerbated as inbound call volumes rise as customers start to worry about service disruptions. Fortunately, help is at hand in dealing with these kinds of challenges. The best cloud-based contact centres ensure complete business continuity in three main ways.

First, good cloud solutions deliver a high level of disaster recovery integrally, meaning clients should not require significant additional cover. For clients with existing onsite customer premises equipment, cloud solutions can also provide reserve back-up disaster recovery protection.

Second, cloud contact centres enable agents to connect to the technology platform and necessary applications from anywhere that has Internet access. Companies can, therefore, continue to service the client base – even in an outage – reducing the impact of what could otherwise have been a disastrous situation, resulting in dropped calls, negative customer experiences and lost revenue.

Third, cloud-based solutions are ideally-suited to supporting homeworkers, allowing businesses to benefit from a pool of agents dispersed across a geographic territory or region that can ‘ramp up’ quickly in the event of one or more facilities going down.

Companies can always benefit from switching on an extended contact centre at any times of raised demand – whether that is planned or unplanned. Cloud allows them to do that while only paying for what they use when they use it. If they are launching a new gadget or game onto the market, they will need to scale, particularly if there are issues with distribution or supply. And if there is a sudden customer surge due to a product failure or a serious concern, they will need to be agile enough to deal with it quickly and efficiently.  The latest cloud contact centre solutions allow them to do all of this and more.