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Telus International on Going to BPOs for Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery

By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor

Contact centers have become the hubs of organizations’ service, support and business. As such, they are vulnerable to disasters in two key ways: when they are threatened and hit by them or are overwhelmed with calls and contacts by such events elsewhere.

The challenge becomes how best both service-and-cost wise to provide contact services. Firms need to be there for their customers and users but they have limited resources available to business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR). While inbound and outbound IVR and web-based solutions can and do help, there are no real substitutes for the assuring, if expensive, human voices in crises.

Paul Egger is vice president, global operations for Telus International. TMCnet recently interviewed him about the option of going to BPO firms like his for contact center BC/DR.

TMCnet:          Why should firms go to a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm for BC/DR, and for which specific functions, events and why them? Compare and contrast BPO offerings to internal or other vendor solutions.

PE:      For many companies, BPO contact center services are becoming mission-critical to managing corporate brand and reputation as well as providing critical services to customers. These services are the lifeline to connecting with customers either via phone, e-mail, online chat and now social media channels like Twitter.

But what if something goes wrong and the contact center goes down?  If you rely on a single BPO provider, or even several centers in the same part of the world, you can entirely lose your ability to communicate with customers when phone lines go down, roads get cut off, power goes down, or your building is damaged.Many firms find that partnering with a specialized BPO contact center firm is the most cost- effective way to ensure “always on” customer service in the face of a local disaster. BPO contact center firms have the expertise, economies of scale, geographic diversity and redundant call center technology to keep business going.  And good BPO contact center providers will have extremely robust business BC/DR plans in place. They often cover events and scenarios ranging from natural disasters, to infrastructure disasters, to people-initiated disasters (intentional or not) that are not always considered or tested by many organizations.There are not a lot of industry stats on disaster recovery perhaps because business interruptions are rarely reported and if they are, they are highly underestimated. When you are a provider of BPO contact center services, it’s hard to hide when things go wrong. Clients are demanding and expect their programs to have 100 percent uptime.

To meet such demand, TELUS (News - Alert) International, for example, has the only OC12 network into the Philippines, with two high bandwidth cable connections including E300 failover redundant circuits; our infrastructure is 100 percent redundant and self healing. In addition, BPO providers have a wealth of information covering how to staff for unusual situations, how to test real world scenarios (and not just equipment failures), how to re-route call traffic to other locations, and how to implement regularly-tested business continuity plans as quickly as possible.

TMCnet:          Compare and contrast having BC/DR program at home versus at contact centers.

PE:      When disasters strike, workplaces, homes and immediate and extended family members may be impacted. When it goes from an infrastructure problem to a people problem, a new series of challenges arise. The human factor can reduce flexibility in disaster response efforts.When agents work at home, there are issues of keeping them connected to the company and keeping them motivated over time. There is a need to maintain the same dynamic found in the workplace which includes the ability to communicate and collaborate in a timely manner with colleagues.  Even if the at-home agent is not impacted, disasters can definitely impact the ability to collaborate and stay connected. As a result, specific BC/DR plans should be in place to address the unique aspects of at-home agent programs. 

TELUS International's parent company, TELUS has had a lot of success with its at-home agents program in Canada reaching over 1,000 at-home agents in 2009.  This program works because the agents have spent a minimum amount of time working in a call center before working from home.  These agents also demonstrate the right behavior, attitude and skill sets for working from home which can be important for executing a BC/DR plan.Agents working in BPO contact centers face another set of issues that include employee willingness or ability to get to work. For example, in 2009 when Typhoon Ketsana hammered Manila with more than 18 inches of rain, the most rainfall in the Philippines in a single day since 1965, the government declared a state of emergency. For TELUS International, getting people to wade through flood waters to get to work was the issue. While we had a fully capable set of facilities that were completely operational, the local community was not as lucky. Thousands of our team members were suddenly without homes, cars, and food, but they were still ready and willing to come to work. The question we had was, where were they and how do we get in touch with them to help them return to work as quickly as possible? Forty percent of cell service in Metro Manila was out of service, under water, in the first major flood of its type in 45 years.TELUS International launched a comprehensive business continuity plan aimed at connecting with agents - first to see if they were safe and then to make sure they could get to work as soon as possible.  This included a range of innovative programs such as:

• Using local radio stations to broadcast messages to team members with a 24/7 emergency hotline for team members to verify their safety (including a backup plan to ensure the hotline would remain operational even with power outages)
• Establishing an enhanced transportation system (named Noah’s Ark) to transport people to work
• Extending support to families so that agents could have peace of mind while they continued to work through the disaster

The Emergency Management Operating Committee or EMOC, comprised of all VP-level staff in the company, reverted to around the clock operations, executing on our prepared disaster recovery strategies and reacting to needs where we saw them. We hired additional vans for transporting people, we contracted hotel rooms to house our loyal team members, we fed thousands of team members free of charge, we provided cash disbursements and pay advances to get them back on their feet, and we built survival kits with blankets, soap, and towels to assist our people. Lessons learned were put into our Major Service Disruption Activities document as a template for best practices.Through it all, we continued to serve our clients from other sites around the world. They did not notice any material disruption to their business. The point is, when you have team members working in a BPO contact center, your plans have to go beyond network and infrastructure preparedness and deal with how to get people to where they need to be to do their jobs.

TMCnet:          What are the best practices in selecting, setting up and working with BPO firms with these programs including notice of impending events?PE:      With increased reliance on third parties for mission critical services, the real issue is how much do businesses know about their outsourced providers?  When it comes to best practices in selecting a BPO firm, it's important to ask the right questions in the first place.  These questions should include:

Is the BPO provider have their operations located in sites with BC/DR in mind?  That is, locations with low incidence of natural disasters (like TELUS International locating its contact center in Las Vegas, Nevada - a main western data hub and home to some of the most advanced technology infrastructure due to its low risk of natural disasters). Or in metro areas for improved infrastructure robustness and labor access

Do their DR plans address physical infrastructure, technology and HR issues?

How is staffing planned for unusual situations?

Can calls be seamlessly re-routed to other locations, including other sites and/or geographies?

Will the voice and data network allow for global, next-available-agent call routing?

Can agents in other locations still take calls in the languages required?

How do they test your environment? Do they actually take real world scenarios into account, not just equipment failures?

What is their contractual uptime guarantee including a definition of what this actually measures? 

Do they comply with recognized organization guidelines like Disaster Recovery International?

Are they audited by a globally recognized risk management firm?

Are they able to leverage relationships with local service providers for telecommunications and power in the affected areas?

How much notice is needed to put alternatives into action?


A particularly common question we receive when it comes to discussing BC/DR with our clients revolves around uptime guarantees in contracts. From a client's perspective, it is important to understand what uptime measures exactly. Often uptime is not measured from the client's site, but from the point it enters the BPO service provider's network. 

Understandably, it is difficult to ensure quality from every carrier in the world, especially when trying to measure when a customer makes a call to a center from a cell phone and the call drops, a common occurrence.  When working with your BPO contact center provider it is important to understand what the uptime levels are, what they are measuring, and what they include e.g. systems, services, HVAC, desktops and phones.It is also important to note that there are scenarios that may impact uptime guarantees. This could include when a client has specific technology tied to a specific endpoint, when changes are made on the client side and they need to inform the BPO provider, and for example, if a firewall is inadvertently closed facing the BPO points of presence. As a best practice, clients and BPO providers should remain open and transparent about potential scenarios that could impact contractual uptime guarantees and document these in advance to ensure an always on positive end customer experience.

TMCnet:          Outline Telus’ BPO BC/DR services and what is new with them

PE:      In the last several years, TELUS International has expanded the geographical reach of its BPO contact center programs and now operates locations in Manila, Guatemala, El Salvador and Las Vegas.  This adds geographic diversity to our programs with stronger BC/DR options for our clients. 

Our parent company, TELUS, is one of Canada's biggest telecommunications companies. It is considered a major BC model for corporate environments in Canada and chairs the Canada wide BCP [business continuity planning] council.  All domestic BCP standards are applied to TELUS International and its nearshore and offshore operations.  We test and flex across geographic boundaries and will continue to refine things as we grow. A few years ago, we were 1,200 team members, now we are 12,000. As you grow, it does get more challenging and testing is much more intense, but a good BC/DR program will take that into account.

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