In a past life I had the privilege of running contact center operations at a leading pharmacy benefits management (PBM) company. Not long ago we experienced an extended PBX outage due to some required maintenance from our vendor that did not go as planned. To minimize service level impact we scheduled this work to occur late at night, but as the patching process failed, the outage extended into our high volume hours. The patch back-out process repeatedly failed and it was determined the PBX software would all have to be re-loaded from scratch, along with literally hundreds of patches, and we needed a way to allow our customer calls to be answered quickly. With stringent Service Level Guarantees contracted with our customers, including fiduciary penalties if not met, we knew we needed to come up with a quick plan to keep the calls flowing to our agents.
Thankfully we had just recently switched over our corporate contact center (our main hub for a total of four different contact centers) to the NICE CXone platform and were able to utilize the built in “disaster recovery” and “business continuity” features offered natively through the NICE CXone solution. Step one was to quickly route customer calls to all agents who had a personal cell phone with them and were willing to have us reimburse them for incurred expenses. The work of changing routing of calls to send them to these temporary cell phone numbers took only minutes and happened almost immediately once we knew we were dealing with an extended hardware outage.
Step two was to send out the management team to purchase some pre-paid cell phones and gather as many other cell phones from around the company as possible. As our cell phone inventory continued to grow throughout the morning we at least had the comfort of knowing our customer calls were being answered and Service Level Guarantees were all being met. We continued assigning new cell phones as the agent population grew that day while we waited for the PBX work to be completed. At the end of the day, after agents had handled calls via cell phones and Bluetooth headsets for most of the day, we ended up meeting all service level requirements for all customers.
Once the patching work was completed on our PBX, it was easy to change the numbers we were routing to, a few at a time, back to the agents' desk phones. This allowed us to ensure the PBX issues were truly resolved first and that we had a stable environment to go back to. As we shared this experience with our parent company, they were almost in disbelief that we were able to so quickly and easily handle this extended PBX outage and not suffer any adverse effects to our service levels. We continued to use this “cell phone” process to cover any PBX maintenance periods to ensure there was absolutely “zero” downtime. This PBX outage would have been disastrous and much more costly for us as a company if had not decided to go with the NICE CXone solution.