Happy Halloween! Scary Contact Center ACD Situations!

Halloween is pretty awesome, in my opinion. While I don’t necessarily get in character with the amount of dedication that many people do, it’s still a fun little ‘holiday.’ I definitely like hitting the web to see what people come up with for costume ideas. Plus, discounted Halloween candy post-October 31st is nice treat. Let’s switch focus to the contact center ACD and some of the scary moments that can occur if you happen to be the administrator of a contact center.

  • Your network is down: This is truly a frightening moment! All of your servers, agent workstations, agent phones or devices, VoIP gateways, and SIP traffic rely on the internet and the ability to talk to any of the connected components. If the network is down or compromised, your contact center may be dead in the water.
  • Your disks are full: Horrifying! Full disks will kill the offending server’s ability to do its job. For example, a full disk on an asterisk server will completely prevent calls from coming in or going out. That’s a dreadful experience for a contact center to have.
  • Your hardware fails: A terribly haunting scenario indeed! This event can be catastrophic, especially if you were not diligent and had backups readily available. Hardware failures can take a contact center ACD days or even weeks to recover from.
Of our three examples here, I’d say that only one of those examples is 100% avoidable, and that’s the full disks. Installing properly sized hard drives in your servers is a good start and directory clean up and maintenance can make this issue a non-factor. The other two examples can be more or less out of your control, so you just need to keep recovery strategies in mind if they do happen.
Now go watch a scary flick before the night is done.