Preparing for holiday and disaster call spikes

Depending on what type of call center you are, you may experience spikes in call traffic during the upcoming holiday season (yes, christmas is less than two months away...). Catalog companies are ready for this and are typically staffed adequately.

What if your call center is an Insurance company and the geographic region you serve is hit with a natural disaster such as New Orleans? Nothing can prepare you for the surge in calls in that case. Or is that true? Insurance companies must use predictive software to determine claim potential. Figure they have a few days' notice. They can probably bring in some temps to help answer the calls. It would be great to hear from some call center managers who went through the New Orleans experience - maybe they could share their planning secrets.

One thing we know for sure is that the combination of three software solutions help to make planning much easier: workforce management, CTI Software such as SimpliCiti and call recording and quality assurance solutions. They combine to provide a balanced, integrated, converged call center solution.

You can never really be prepared for a situation like New Orleans. You CAN be prepared for almost everything else.

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