Why do most organisations insist on paying twice to recover their inbound calls?

Convincing the CEO that they should pay out in advance for a business disruption which may never happen is perhaps the biggest obstacle to implementing a robust business continuity plan, particularly in times of recession when budgets are squeezed. But the financial impact of having to; firstly implement an emergency solution when a disruption personally affects your organisation, and secondly implementing a more permanent telecoms recovery solution covering you for future disruptions, is considerable. Surely it is far more cost effective to pay just once for a plan which covers you for every eventuality. The problem is that we don’t think that a disruption will happen to us, and there is a known psychological reason for this.

Research has proven that we are all susceptible to a human condition known as ‘optimism bias’. This is the tendency for people to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions. This includes over-estimating the likelihood of positive events and under-estimating the likelihood of negative events. A study conducted by Armor and Talyor (“When predictions fail: The Dilemma of Unrealistic Optimism”, 2002) on this subject found that most smokers believe that they are at far less risk of developing smoking related illnesses than other smokers and cancer patients believed they were suffering far less than other cancer patients. A brain imaging study (Sharot, Tali; Alison M. Riccardi, Candace M. Raio, Elizabeth A. Phelps (2007-10-24)."Neural mechanisms mediating optimism bias” ) has also revealed that when people imagine a negative event they have far less reaction from the emotion centre of their brains than if they remember negative events which actually occurred in the past. Such a tendency within a business continuity context can leave an organisation vulnerable to a multitude of potential disruptions, both major and minor, which they simply don’t believe will happen to them.

Where business continuity plans often focus on major disruptions such as flood, fire or terrorist attack, contingency for protecting incoming telecoms from minor disruptions is sometimes woefully inadequate, and these types of event are actually far more likely to affect your organisation. Such disruptions can include: water leaks, or lack of water supply, which, due to health and safety laws, renders your building unfit for use by your employees and therefore requires people to be relocated. Or an air conditioning malfunction which is of particular concern for modern offices where windows cannot physically be opened, causing temperatures to soar during heat waves. Even office maintenance or noisy roadworks outside your building can disturb employees, reduce productivity, and make it difficult to answer the phone professionally. In an article by Geoff Howard, CEO of Continuity Shop (published in Accountancy Age, 15th March 2007), minor disruptions occur due to many unforeseen reasons:

“Threats [to a business] should be eliminated wherever possible, but there are always threats no one has thought of…Those who made a plan for the HQ of a certain emergency service didn’t plan for a rat gnawing through a cable and disrupting command and control…The trick of getting it right is to make plans against the loss of functions, not against the cause of the loss of functions.”

For major disruptions such as fire or flood, most costs will be covered by an organisation’s insurance policy, but for an inconvenient disruption such as a faulty water supply the cost of lost man hours can be considerable and it makes far more sense to protect your organisation from loss of productivity than claiming on insurance to re-coup any losses. Indeed most insurance claims for utility disruptions do not begin until seven days after the event and quite often there is an upper limit to the compensation available. Also it should be noted that if a company is denied access to its offices because of a disruptive event affecting a neighbouring building, the company cannot claim on its business interruption policy unless the policy specifically covers ‘denial of access’.

The types of costs you can expect to incur as a result of a disruptive event, when an insufficient business continuity plan is in place, include:

And if you thought the likelihood of a facility failure in the UK is low then be warned! There is increasing evidence that our utility networks in the UK are extremely vulnerable. A recent inquiry by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) titled ‘The State of the Nation: Defending Critical Infrastructure’, found that even though some measures are being taken by the government to improve resilience, ‘work remains piecemeal and there are still far too many gaps in our infrastructure defence system, leaving the UK vulnerable to crises.’ (as reported on Continuity Central on the 26th June 2009).

The acid test would be to pull the plug on any of your critical services and measure the impact it instantly has upon your business. If your customers and suppliers can’t get through to your organisation because the phone lines are down or there is nobody in the office, you can start to ‘feel’ the damaging effects to your business and subsequently on the finances. Quantifying the loss of revenue, customer dissatisfaction and loss of productivity are all particularly difficult but that does not mean they are as easily reconcilable as collateral damage.

Research has been conducted into the associated value brand contributes to an organisation and it has been equated to 85%, as reported in research by KPMG.

This intangible brand power must be harnessed whenever the brand (or product) is, touched, seen or experienced by customers and suppliers alike, and this includes the power of employee brand representation. Consequently the service a customer receives when they are contacting your company by telephone will have a significant effect on the organisation’s brand value through customers’ perceptions. Therefore your organisation cannot afford to be in a situation where your customers can’t get through to their intended recipient.

The solution is quite simple. If you re-route those incoming customer and supplier phone calls to nominated mobile phones, another office location, or people’s home phones when your normal office telephone system is disrupted, then you can provide the seamless customer service you strive to achieve on a consistent basis, regardless of where your employees are located. For over 10 years GemaTech have been delivering such a service to a wide range of forward-thinking organisations, providing the resilience and continuity that enables those businesses to stand out against the competition, even during disruptive events. On a number of occasions the GemaTech solution has provided business continuity for customers when their incoming leased lines have been severed or faulty, by instantly and seamlessly re-routing the incoming calls to alternative phones.

For one organisation in particular, employing GemaTech’s incoming call recovery solution for flexible working purposes was a life-line during the severe snow the UK encountered in February 2009. As employees were unable to get into the office, calls were re-routed to home phones and mobiles to enable business as usual for the organisation. The same customer also benefited during the G20 summit protests as it again allowed employees to receive calls from home rather than them having to battle to get to the central London offices through extra traffic and protestors.

These organisations have invested once in a solution which has already proven its worth and flexibility. The employees are used to being able to work from both the office, or away from it and therefore should any disruption occur at the office, they can continue providing business as usual for their customers with no need for extra pay outs to restore their incoming telecoms.

Unfortunately many companies feel that now is not the time to invest in a long term continuity plan, and they tend to think that during a recession the focus should be on cost-cutting and profit protection. Well as Stephanie Balaouras, analyst at Forrester Research Inc. points out ‘Under economic pressure, people want to target [business continuity] for cost-cutting, but the disaster or the downtime isn't going to wait for the recession to be over.’

Your organisation is vulnerable to outages and disruptive events 365 days of the year and therefore adequate protection is needed to ensure that your customers can always reach you by telephone, regardless of the circumstances within which your organisation finds itself. Invest with GemaTech just once for a long term, flexible solution which offers flexibility to your employees during the good times and the bad, and you should never need to pay twice for inbound telecoms recovery.

For more information on GemaTech's products and applications email us at marketing@gematech.com: visit our web site www.gematech.com or call 0800 328 8354