Convergys is one of the world’s largest teleservices firms. It employs nearly 75,000 employees who serve clients in over 70 countries, speaking more than 35 languages, from 85 contact centers and other facilities – including employees’ homes – across the globe. Organizations rely on Convergys (News - Alert) to be there for them, meeting their needs. In turn this means that Convergys needs to have effective and proven business continuity strategies.

 

TMCnet contacted Convergys to discuss BC priorities and strategies. Here is the interview we had with Carol A. Fox, senior director, and Mike Epstein, senior manager, business continuity planning group:

 

TMCnet: Outline the top three business continuity priorities for Convergys.

 

CF/ME: Our BC program drives company-wide focus on four key priorities:

 

1.         Protect human life

 

Each of our operating sites is led by an authorized and trained incident commander. This individual is responsible for the overall planning, prevention, preparedness, response and recovery for local business disruptions. We are very clear in our training and exercises that safety is the number one consideration in a disruptive event.

 

2.         Protect Convergys facilities

 

Keeping the site, its contents and our employees secure allows us to continue operating in our own facilities, whenever possible

 

3.         Provide an acceptable level of operational continuity

 

We focus on continuing or resuming operations as soon as feasible from a client perspective. Executing the client-specific disaster recovery plans by the identified operations leaders, such as rerouting calls to alternate sites, depends on teamwork with our clients and our corporate support functions.

 

4.         Restore Convergys facilities

 

In the event that our facilities are damaged, specific teams, such as technology recovery and facility restoration, are activated to allow operations to focus on our main mission – delivering customer service.

 

These priorities drive the decisions of our site-specific incident command teams, with its focus on employee safety and resource availability. Our site operations, technology and client program-specific recovery plans focus on infrastructure and client operations recovery. 

 

TMCnet:  What keeps you up at night?

 

CF/ME: At Convergys, we don’t concentrate on a multitude of potential incidents that keep us up at night and then develop specific plans for each of them. Rather, we conduct a risk assessment to identify the specfic site threats, and the existing controls that mitigate the risk of disruption. We go through potential worst case scenarios with the local incident command team to understand the potential disruption it would have on operations at that site.  

 

If, for example, the worst case is a hurricane, we focus on the resource impacts that event would cause. Perhaps the site is built to withstand hurricane forces. Rather than assume that building resiliency is all that is needed, we build the scenario to raise other issues. Playing through the scenario might reveal that local authorities could be expected to evacuate an area where most employees reside. How site management would care for the replacement or reallocation of those resources is then incorporated into the overall site plan.

 

This practice allows us to develop one plan to support response and recovery in potentially less severe situations, as well as the worst case. We design our planning so that the basic strategy, tactics, activation, and recovery processes cover many different scenarios. In this way, in our example above, any disruption that keeps employees from getting to work such as civil authorities, flooding and pandemics would enable site management team to activate its “event-neutral” plan. 

 

TMCnet: What’s different about operating in various regions of the world from a business continuity perspective?  

 

CF/ME: Actually, geographic diversity provides a built-in resiliency from a business continuity perspective. Large client programs with a blended geo-solution greatly improve the odds of sustaining customer service through various types of events. At the same time, alternate geographies may be more exposed to natural disasters or may not have the technical infrastructure, power or network, needed to support continued operations. Local governments may not have the resources to withstand or respond quickly to natural or man-made disasters. 

 

Our planning and processes for business continuity are consistent across our global operations. Our risk assessments for selecting sites take the local risks into account. For example, we reject sites in flood-prone or storm run-off areas regardless of geography. We design our global technical infrastructure to mitigate disruption risks, with uninterruptible power supply and generators. As a result, our facilities and network are built to maintain normal operations throughout disruptive events. Our preparations allow us to focus more on our employees’ and clients’ needs. A recent event in the Philippines illustrates this outcome:

 

 

 

 

TMCnet: Describe Convergys’ BC strategies, enterprise-wide and by region

 

 

 

 

 

While our strategies are enterprise-wide and consistent from region to region, disruptive events tend to be local in nature, either by site or by region. When an incident involves more than one site, and multiple business units, we activate our regional unified command tactical response. The benefits of this regional incident command approach are many:

 

·         Improves information flow between the sites involved

·         Develops a single collective approach to incident management

·         Reduces or eliminates functional and geographical complexities

·         Optimizes the efforts of all site incident command teams

·         Reduces/eliminates duplication of effort

·         Draws upon experienced incident command leadership skills

·         Provides single, direct interface with multiple business unit executives

 

TMCnet: Outline any changes Convergys has and plans to make in its BC plans, why, and what are the goals?

 

CF/ME: We continually update and revise our plans as we learn from each and every disruptive event what works and what doesn’t and then apply that learning across our global operations. As our business changes, we use those shifts in service delivery to our business continuity advantage.

 

 

We receive questions from clients who are concerned about the potential impact of the H1N1 virus on our operations. At Convergys, we have included communicable disease preparedness as a component of our continuity program for nearly 10 years. This planning supported our response to the SARS and Avian Flu threats and has been enhanced in response to H1N1. Our primary focus in communicable disease events is on employee health and client service.

 

Our goal is to avoid panic through planning, prevention and preparedness. In planning, we’ve established a core global, cross-functional team while reaching out to local authorities regarding their expected actions. We actively monitor health sites across our geographies, and work with our benefits providers for home care tips. Focusing on prevention, we provide anti-microbial soap and hand sanitizers at our sites globally. We’ve instituted procedures for accelerated facility cleaning in sites where an employee may be diagnosed with H1N1. We provide periodic employee communications and developed an online educational module about H1N1. Finally, we’ve preparedour teams through pandemic-mock exercises. Our intelligent rerouting capabilities, coupled with our home agent offerings, gives us service location flexibility.