Hurricane season brings more than just storm clouds—it also brings uncertainty, fear, and immense challenges for many businesses, especially those with customer-facing operations like contact centers.

The human impact of these events is undeniable: employees may be directly affected by the storm, customers reach out in moments of distress, and businesses are stretched thin as they try to keep operations running. In these moments, the ability to maintain connection and offer support can make all the difference.

Overwhelmed Contact Centers

When a natural disaster occurs, certain industries—such as insurance, travel, logistics, and utilities—experience a dramatic surge in call volume. Customers are seeking assistance and timely responses and resolutions during one of the most stressful times in their lives, whether they are filing insurance claims, canceling travel plans, or making emergency arrangements. Contact centers become a critical lifeline, and the pressure on these businesses is intense. Phones ring off the hook, websites and chat are inundated with traffic and wait times can skyrocket.

Stressed Employees

Behind every call answered in a contact center is a human being. Your employees are the unsung heroes during a crisis, often dealing with upset or panicked customers while simultaneously managing their own concerns about the storm. Long hours emotionally charged conversations, and system challenges can leave even the most seasoned agents feeling overwhelmed.

Displaced Workforce

In disaster-prone areas, it’s not uncommon for employees themselves to be displaced by the storm. Whether evacuated from their homes or cut off from their usual work locations, employees might find themselves working from unfamiliar environments. This often means using unvetted or unreliable Wi-Fi networks at hotels, relatives’ homes, or other temporary shelters. These situations can severely disrupt communication systems and introduce new vulnerabilities.

Variable Preparedness

While some businesses in the southern U.S. are well-prepared for hurricane season, and those in tornado alley know it’s inevitable at certain times of the year and test regularly, others might not have the same level of readiness. The degree of preparation can vary widely, from robust disaster recovery plans to businesses that are caught off guard when the storm makes landfall.

At Nectar, we’ve long understood the critical importance of maintaining business continuity during such crises. Our solutions are built to provide resilience and support in exactly these situations, ensuring that businesses not only survive but maintain exceptional service levels.

Testing and Monitoring:

• Load, Stress, and Performance Testing with CX Assurance: Ensuring that contact centers are prepared for the increased load, before a storm hits, is critical. By simulating high call volumes and stress scenarios, our testing solutions help businesses assess whether their systems can handle the surge. We monitor for potential points of failure, flagging issues that could lead to dropped calls or slow response times.
• Web Interaction Manager: It’s not just phones that are ringing. Customers are also flocking to websites to check claim statuses, flight cancellations, and hotel availabilities. Our Web Interaction Manager tests your web-based customer touchpoints, helping you verify that websites and mobile applications perform efficiently under stress. This can be critical when trying to balance call and digital interactions effectively during an emergency.

These proactive steps mean that businesses don’t have to scramble to address technical failures mid-crisis. Testing ahead of the storm ensures systems are resilient when they are most needed.

Enhanced Ear-to-Ear Monitoring (via our Jabra partnership):

Our partnership with Jabra provides businesses with powerful tools to monitor and support agents during intense situations. With enhanced ear-to-ear monitoring, Jabra headsets offer a way to monitor the interactions more closely and provide insights that can help identify stress points:

• Sentiment Analysis: By analyzing the tone and emotion of both the agent and the customer, managers can identify when agents are struggling or when customers are upset, allowing for immediate intervention.
• Cross-talking and Noise Level Analysis: High levels of noise or interruptions can indicate both a stressful call environment and the need for improved support.
• Support and Coaching: With real-time insights, managers can provide targeted coaching, help with workload distribution, or even suggest a brief reprieve for overstressed agents.

With these insights, businesses can support their employees as they navigate the challenges of high-pressure, high-emotion interactions, maintaining not just business continuity, but a high-quality customer experience throughout.

Outside-In Testing:

When employees are displaced, ensuring they can remain productive is critical to the overall success of the business during the storm. Nectar’s Endpoint Client offers a way to assess endpoint availability across various locations. By monitoring whether remote employees have reliable access to the network and communication tools, businesses can quickly adapt to new working conditions and provide support as needed.

• Real-Time Testing: Monitor and verify the availability and performance of endpoints, especially those connecting through non-traditional or temporary networks.
• Routing Validation: Ensure that calls and communications are being routed correctly even as employees move from one location to another, possibly working from unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks.

With these tools, businesses can ensure their remote and displaced teams remain functional, regardless of their physical location.

Diagnostics:

For those contact centers that may need to be taken offline—whether preemptively or due to unforeseen circumstances—UCD (Unified Communications Diagnostics) Monitoring ensures that traffic is rerouted seamlessly. Nectar’s UCD Monitoring allows businesses to:

• Validate Traffic Routing: Ensure that, if a contact center must be taken offline temporarily, communications are routed to other sites, locations, or backup teams without disruption.
• Ensure Continuity: Real-time monitoring confirms that all communication channels remain functional, even if a particular site or office is temporarily unavailable.

This capability is critical for businesses that may need to proactively shut down parts of their operations to ensure the safety of their employees or their infrastructure. By testing and monitoring these systems in advance, businesses can act swiftly when the need arises.

Providing Value in Times of Crisis

Businesses don’t have to face these challenges unprepared. We can help ensure that systems remain robust, employees supported, and customers well-served, even during the most disruptive events.

From load testing that simulates call surges to real-time endpoint monitoring that ensures displaced workers remain connected, our focus is on ensuring business continuity, high-quality customer interactions, and effective team support.

In times of crisis, preparedness isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity, and it’s never too late plan. We’re here to help at whatever point you need, so you can get ahead of the next disaster. Let us know how we can help.