When designing a phone system or contact center you need to ask yourself: “What level of service is required for my organization?”
The typical response is to implement an expensive geographically redundant system at a secondary data centre. Used in the event of a failure at the main facility.
Two main considerations that have to be addressed:
First, what level of availability do you need?
The true test for availability is when a system enters a failure condition. When the system fails over to alternate services or systems, what occurs in the environment?
With many systems, fail-over of contact centre components results in all of the calls in queue being lost, and agent phones failing over to alternate servers. These fail-overs can be seconds to minutes for the system to come back online.
In many architectures, locally redundant technologies can fail-over without loss of calls or activities, where failing over to a secondary site would result in longer down time.
Second, are your staff available?
Many organizations have turned to 3rd party data centres for backup and resiliency. While these work well for managing data, these facilities may not be able to accommodate staff. In addition, there can be a significant delay in getting staff to an alternate location to turn up services. This results in a period of time where operationally your organization is unavailable and can have a significant impact on your service delivery.
Before committing to a geographically redundant architecture, it is important to determine how an outage will impact your organization and the amount of time being out of service will affect you.
Organizations that require high availability should consider cloud services and should operate with multiple geographically located contact centres to ensure continuity of service. If you are looking for a new system, you should also clearly articulate the requirements for the performance of the system in your contracts.
