recent annual survey by recruitment firm Harvey Nash Group and accounting firm KPMG showed that cybersecurity vulnerability — as demonstrated by the latest ransomware cases — is at an all-time high, with a third of IT leaders (32%) reporting their organization had been subject to a major cyberattack in the past 24 months — a 45%  increase from 2013. Even more concerning, only one in five (21%) say they are “very well” prepared to respond to these attacks, down from 29%in 2014.

Once a data breach or cyberattack hits, customers have little patience for not being able to reach your company. They wonder, has my provider been hacked or worse, had a ransomware attack?  Has my data been compromised? If they can’t contact the organization, they are quick to call another provider. Even if customers cannot switch to your competition immediately, they will become quickly frustrated and concerned when you experience an outage in your contact center.

But cyberattacks are not the only reason for downtime in your contact center. Natural disasters, planned maintenance, service interruption, or an unanticipated spike in volume that exceeds capacity can all be causal factors for unavailability. The costs can add up quickly for any outage. Not only do you incur the costs of lost productivity and revenue, but you also incur the loss of goodwill with your customers and prospects and potentially with investors and the broader market. Any outage seems to hit the nightly news and twitter feeds almost daily. How companies communicate with customers can either help resolve a bad situation or amplify it into a fully blown media disaster!

An August 2016 survey by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) finds that 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000; 81% of respondents indicated that 60 minutes of downtime costs their business over $300,000. And a record one-third or 33% of enterprises report that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1 million to over $5 million.

Serenova can mitigate the risk associated with unplanned downtime or capacity spikes. With our low cost, always-on CxEngage Standby Cloud solution, your agents can be up and running immediately. When the need arises, just repoint your phone numbers to the CxEngage Standby Cloud instance. From there, it’s business as usual. No need to publish a new set of numbers to your customers – calls and SMS are easily rerouted. Agents log into the CxEngage toolbar, access via your CRM, or dial in on a mobile phone. Our call center disaster recovery solution provides even remote agents a means to recover from a localized event, such as workstation failure or the loss of landline or internet connections. Remote agents can now log into the queue by calling into an IVR via their mobile or landline – no internet connection needed. No other disaster recover call center solutions boast a simpler failover process. Whether your contact center is on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid, get a backup in the cloud that’s affordable, easy to switch over, and always ready to use.

Check out our data sheet for more information or contact Serenova to find out how we can help you with instant failover and disaster recovery.