You hear a scrape against the pavement. It is not a footstep, but rather the sound of something being dragged. You’ve just made your commute to work and are walking through the parking garage. A figure looms in the distance, barely visible. It’s still dark outside in the pre-dawn hours of the morning. The hairs on the back of your neck prick up.
You walk faster, shaking your head and telling yourself not to over-think it. It’s probably just someone else that works in your office building. Your morning coffee hasn’t kicked in and this could just be the remnants of a nightmare.
They come out of the mist, staggering, flesh trailing in threads from their very bones. They shamble, limbs decaying, clothes falling away until they're barely recognizable as human.
You break into a sprint and make it inside, locking the door.
The horde has caught up, thrashing against the thick glass of the window. Palms scraping and sliding, leaving bloody smears; they are desperate to get inside.
Their sepulchral moans resound, quickening the blood that runs through your veins. Your pulse quickens and your brow begins to drip with sweat as you brace yourself, barricaded behind a door, hiding under your desk. Your office is now a fortress, but the phone lines are dead. Help is not on the way.
How are you supposed to fight off the gathering horde? It’s a real nightmare.
Don’t worry! This isn’t World War Z. It’s simply a spike in callers that your contact center might face during certain seasons. Working in retail? You might experience this around the holidays, starting with Black Friday. Perhaps you work for a gaming or electronics company about to release a new product that has been gathering hype in the tech arena? You’ll see the amount of callers spike drastically. Or, are you running a vacation-oriented business? As the weather warms for beach-goers and cruise-lovers, or temperatures drop below zero for the extreme winter sports enthusiasts, you might want to brace yourself for a sudden burst of call volume.
Unlike the zombie apocalypse scenario, you have absolutely nothing to fear as long as your contact center software solution can handle a sudden spike in callers. Not that you should think about your callers as the undead, but sometimes they can certainly become just as overwhelming.
Our Zombie Survival Guide Tools:
1. A Cloud-based Platform
A cloud-based or hosted system offers more scalability so that you can quickly adapt to changes in volume. This means more than just the ability to add extra call center seats as the volume of inbound or outbound calls starts to increase. If your software system is not capable of handling the increased volume, then you may experience network outages that leave you vulnerable. A contact center software system hosted through a public cloud like Amazon AWS is more secure and can ensure nearly 100% uptime.
Scalability in a cloud-based system also means that when the onslaught of calls finally recedes, you can scale your contact center down so that you’re not paying for anything you don’t need.
Get up in the cloud. Zombies are stuck on the ground, man.
2. Grid Computing Technology
Would you rather have one lone sniper face a horde of the undead funneled down a passageway, or would a tag-team of fighters be able to better defend the walls of a fortress? I don’t care how good of a shot that sniper is, the horde is going to overwhelm him.
You can think of that lone gunslinger as a centralized server, while the evenly spread team of survivors is like a grid network; they’re able to take on more by distributing responsibilities. A distributed grid architecture like V-TAG uses multiple end points, such as agent PC’s, to create a reliable, backed-up network.
If the lone sniper goes down, that’s the end, but if one of the team gets taken out, the rest of them are still covered and can pick up the slack. If a centralized server crashes, it causes an outage for the whole system. If a component of a grid network goes down, functions can be maintained. Grid computing is a fully redundant system for extra protection against zombie bites, I mean, system outages.
3. Outreach Features
Contact Center features that promote easy outreach are to call spikes what flamethrowers are to a horde of zombies. Think of them as a resource for crowd management during a call swarm.
- A call blast is a great offensive weapon. With one recorded message, you can reach out to your customers about anything that may cause them to want to call in, such as holiday store hours, or the essential details of a product release. A Call Blast function will clear up many FAQ’s, freeing up your call center agents to fight the real battle; processing orders.
- A predictive dialer weeds out no-answers, answering machines, and fax machines so that your contact center agents make the most efficient use of their time dealing with real live customers. It’s like a special tool to weed out survivors versus the living dead.
- Skills-based routing coupled with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) makes it so that calls are distributed intelligently to the contact center agents most knowledgeable and best equipped to handle the concerns of the customer making the call. Multiple zombies? Routed to the guy with the machine gun. Zombie with its legs sliced off? Goes to a less experienced fighter.
Well, there you have it. No need to fear a spike in call volume the way that you would the zombie apocalypse. It’s an easily manageable scenario with the right weapons (oops, I mean, tools). Here is your zombie survival guide, and you should be quick about gathering up the necessary supplies. When business booms, the dead don’t walk, they run!
