COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Business Continuity Planning and Resources

Like any environment in which many colleagues are working in close physical proximity to one another, contact centers can be at risk for spreading germs even under the best of circumstances. Having agents work from the office during an outbreak could increase the chances of the infection passing among them and further decimating your agent availability. Consider your employees’ commutes on public transportation as well, which will further potentially expose them to the outbreak.

NICE inContact is now providing CXone@home, a free work-from-home offer for 45-days to support business continuity, and the following best practice resources.

Flexibility to quickly and dynamically change the physical location of your contact center is another essential tool in handling fast-moving emergencies.  Generally, this can involve closing one or more locations and rerouting customer or citizen inquiries to one or more alternative locations (internal or with Business Process Outsourcing / BPO partners) or distributing contacts across multiple active sites to better handle spikes in volume.

NICE inContact CXone supports contact centers and work-from-home agents in over 100 countries in a single software instance, allowing a global queue and high-quality, low latency voice service.

Many businesses and government entities have already seen a large spike in customer contacts since the COVID-19 outbreak. To continue serving customers and citizens in this dynamic environment, call center software must have two very critical capabilities: elastic scalability and rapid changes to contact flows, IVR dialogs, and other operational processes.

Even if you are not already using an elastic, cloud native platform for your contact center, it is possible to move to CXone within days if needed. The following resources below show how quickly NICE inContact can help your organization move.

Paramount to providing service in the event of a pandemic affecting your area is to ensure that customers are always able to reach the contact center even in the event of network or voice service outages. NICE inContact CXone has a global, geographically redundant cloud infrastructure with built-in elasticity to dynamically scale up or down based on demand. We proactively monitor and continuously forecast demand with reserves for immediate spikes in volume and ability to add data and storage capacity immediately. Customers can rely on the 99.99% guaranteed availability on our carrier-grade network with global data centers and points of presence (POPs) as well as 24/7/365 network operations monitoring.

Internally, we have proactively activated our Business Continuity Plan that addresses both readiness and response. Specifically, we have taken the following measures:

• Limited non-critical business travel for NICE employees worldwide
• Established remote work procedures where relevant
• Required all employees who have visited affected areas to self-quarantine for a period of 14 days
• Expanded the resilience and elasticity of our cloud infrastructure, as we experience an increase in volumes

We are also offering a FREE business continuity assessment for your contact center. Please contact us if interested.