In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Nepal and north India, we kept asking ourselves one question – how can we minimize the effects of a natural disaster on a business? We are sure that business owners from around the world often consider the same.
Industrious as we are, we often find ourselves helpless during natural disasters, be it an earthquake, hurricane or heavy snowfall. In situations like these, businesses have to ensure the safety of its employees, maintaining a smooth operation and responding to its customers in the hour of need. And for this, businesses need a rock solid backup plan that will help them mitigate losses and keep running the operations as seamlessly as possible.
Unfortunately, a large percentage of businesses fail to plan for natural disasters and emergencies. It leaves them susceptible to heavy losses that could have been avoided.
As most disasters come unannounced, it is better to prepare beforehand. At Fusion CX, we follow a defined plan to prevent any losses due to natural disasters. All you need is a few important tactics. Some of them are:
Set a Protocol: Make sure your employees know exactly what is expected from them when an emergency, natural or man-made occurs. Creating a checklist to eliminate confusion or uncertainty can be a good idea.
Fusion CX believes in training its employees on disaster management and recovery and ensures that they adhere to the plan in case of a disaster.
Make a Continuity Plan: Identify routine activities that are critical to the business and evaluate whether they can continue during a disaster.
Fusion CX evaluates each emergency situation and decides on the viability of running the mission-critical activities.
Get Backup Contacts: Make sure you have a comprehensive staff contact list, including home and cell phone numbers, emergency contact information, personal email addresses, and home addresses.
From our experience, we have known this list to be very useful during emergencies.
Use the Cloud: Regularly backup key documents and data in a secure virtual environment.
Fusion CX has two data centers in India and the United States where we backup data and documents regularly and use each as the other’s backup.
Go Remote: Establish and offer a system for your employees to work remotely from home. Thanks to cloud-based virtual private networks (VPNs) working remotely from home has become quite easy.
We have a large number of home-based agents in the United States who can be immensely helpful in case of a localized disaster. In case of a national emergency in the United States, we can depend on our centers in Canada, India, the Philippines, and El Salvador.
Your customers may need you the most during such emergencies (for example- insurance claims), you can always consider outsourcing your customer services, inquiry handling, claim processing services to a reputable call center. In fact, partnering with a call center can be beneficial for your business on many levels.
No one wants to fall victim to a disaster situation, natural or otherwise. However it serves us all well to stay prepared for such cases.
At Fusion CX our heart goes out to the earthquake victims of Nepal. We sincerely hope that everything will get back to normal for everyone as soon as humanly possible.
