The nature of an organisation’s line of business typically defines the criticality of its contact centre operation. For example, an organisation that provides emergency services such as the Police, Fire or Ambulance service has a critical dependency on their contact centre being available to field and service emergency calls, whereas a retailer offering a contact centre as a sales channel has less of a critical dependency as alternative digital channels such as web are often available.
Understanding the criticality of your contact centre operation is key when it comes to planning, designing and implementing contact centre technology and operational processes. To help shape this understanding, analysis should be carried out in relation to customer impact, operational risk, and reputational damage to determine the availability, resilience and business continuity requirements for each contact centre channel
Using criticality as the primary variable, teams responsible for designing the contact centre must decide whether the contact centre platform is designed to be fault tolerant, highly available, or built on a best endeavour’s basis.
Table 1. indicates the key parameters of each of these design approaches in more detail;