How a Contact Center Can Help with Natural Disaster Preparedness
When you outsource the customer service and notification aspects of disaster recovery solution to a contact center, you're completely covered.
Articles published June 4, 2018
For a small business, preparation is key. Whether an unexpected technology issue arises or a natural disaster strikes, having a plan and reliable partners in place is crucial to keep moving forward without losing momentum. Many organizations think through potential impacts and continuity plans when it comes to cyberattacks and glitches, but have you given consideration to how your customer service could be impacted in the event of a disaster?
While you can’t control when hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, or other natural disasters might occur, your business can plan ahead for how you can stay connected to your customers if the unforeseeable happens with a disaster recovery strategy.
When Natural Disaster Strikes
Hurricane Irma, which slammed into Florida in September 2017, serves as a stark reminder that disaster preparedness — particularly at senior living facilities — requires more than just a hurricane preparedness plan focused on moving residents to safe ground. While evacuating employees and residents is, of course, an important aspect of natural disaster preparedness, so are the plans put in place to notify families of the location and condition of their loved ones living in the senior community. When you partner with an outsourced call center, you can focus on keeping your people safe and trust the contact center to communicate those important emergency updates to those who need to know.
An article in the Orlando Sentinel in September 2017 details what can happen when important information is not communicated during a disaster. The article described a Vero Beach resident whose 62-year-old brother resided in a senior living community 110 miles up the coast in Winter Park. He had not been heard from days after Hurricane Irma tore through that region. “There’s no way to reach them,” the sister was reported to have said about the situation.
When disaster strikes, it can sometimes happen quickly, perhaps so quickly that the loved ones of those living in a senior community don’t even know where they’ve been taken because a notification system wasn’t established. However, when you outsource the notification aspect of a disaster recovery to a contact center, you’re completely covered.
Likewise, if your small business is uprooted in the event of a natural disaster, you want to be sure your customers — those who live inside and outside of the impacted area — are still able to contact your business as usual. By partnering with a contact center, agents dedicated to your brand can continue to handle all incoming customer service inquiries while you focus on keeping your local employees and infrastructure safe.
Contact Centers Help with Natural Disaster Preparedness
At Aureon, our three Midwest-based contact centers have the technology in place to reach out to concerned families and customers through multiple channels. Connected through the Aureon Fiber Optic Network, our centers are equipped with carrier-grade, redundant, self-healing, and symmetrical network access to continue providing reliable service even when your business is impacted by the unexpected.
For senior living communities located in hurricane-prone regions, consider incorporating a contact center into your hurricane preparedness plan. Heavy winds associated with those storms can tear down phone lines, making the traditional telephonic communication impossible. However, with Aureon’s HIPAA-compliant technology, we can store all the data necessary for reaching out to families of residents during a disaster through channels that don’t rely on phone lines; we can do that through text messaging and email.
We are equipped with automated technology that can quickly send mass texts and emails with all the vital information a family would want to know in a time of crisis. Furthermore, our contact center is staffed to handle incoming calls so customers can speak directly to a person who is knowledgeable about how a disaster is being handled.
Regardless of the region in which your business is located, partnering with an outsourced call center can provide you with peace of mind and let you focus on keeping your organization running.
Contact us today and let’s discuss our risk management solutions.