Business Continuity Planning - Getting Started

Telax is focused on continually improving our services and infrastructure for our clients and partners around the world. We maintain a service desk with clear incident management processes to deliver client support. In the event of a service disruption with Telax, please review the information below to ensure that you are receiving the most up to date information and some best practices on how to handle them.

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to start the conversation and explore together to understand the supporting technologies, their impact on the service during an outage and layers of accountability for resolution. Telax welcomes the opportunity to meet to conduct a deeper dive to understand your needs and together develop a custom business continuity plan for your contact center. This plan will include best practice strategies we are using today in many of our customer deployments.

The Key Technology Components to the Telax Service

There are four key technology services that are required to maintain the smooth operation of the Telax service for your customers and agents.

1. Telecommunications carrier's networks for Voice communication
2. ISP services for Data (internet or private network) interconnection to Telax
3. The Telax Datacenters and Core components supporting the Telax Application
4. Customer premise Local networks and phones

Accountability and management of these services is shared between Telax, the Customer and Channel partners. The management mix of these services may vary depending if your company is serviced directly by Telax or through a channel partner of Telax.

Telecommunications carriers for Voice communication

The services required to keep voice communication flowing between your customers and your agents.
Disruption in these services can impact the following:

1. 1. Toll free calling
   2. Local access calling
   3. Calling to agents phones
   4. Calling to customer phones

Who manages these services
Managed by Telax for Direct customers
Managed by Telax Channel Partners
Suggested mitigation strategies, if applicable:

• Toll free calling can be switched to alternative provider networks
• Redirection of Toll free to alternative local calling numbers

ISP services for Data (internet or private network) interconnection to Telax

The data networks which are required to maintain connectivity back to the Telax Cloud to keep track of statistics and status regarding the customer and agent contact.
Disruption in these services can impact the following:

1. 1. Telax Agent software – CCA
   2. Calling to agents phones via the CCA
   3. Calling to Customer phones – via the CCA
   4. Telax Administration Portal

Who manages these services
Managed by Customer local technology groups (i.e. IT or Network services)
Managed by Telax Channel Partners if supplied by the channel partner
Suggested mitigation strategies, if applicable:

• Post Telax bulletins advising of longer queue times and or outage impact
• Log agents into Telax via the Teleagent option

The Telax Datacenters and Core components supporting the Application

The represents all the core technology services (network /server/storage/database etc) that reside in the Telax datacenter
Disruption in these services can impact the following:

1. 1. All Voice calling services
   2. All Queuing services ( i.e. Voice , Email , Chat)
   3. Telax Agent software – CCA and WEB based CCA
   4. Telax Administration Portal

Who manages these services: Telax
Suggested mitigation strategies, if applicable:

• Post Telax bulletins advising of longer queue times and or outage impact
• Log agents into Telax via the Teleagent option
• Redirection of Toll free to alternative local calling numbers and or local PBX hunt groups

Customer Premise local networks and phones

The section represents the local data, local dial tone and phone systems deployed by the customer to support the call center.
Disruption in these services can impact the following:

1. 1. Telax Agent software – CCA
   2. Telax Administration Portal
   3. Calling to agents phones
   4. Calling to Customer agent phones

Who manages these services:
Managed by Customer local technology groups ( ie IT or Network services)
Managed by Telax Channel Partners if supplied by the channel partner
Suggested mitigation strategies, if applicable:

• Post Telax bulletins advising of longer queue times and or outage impact
• Log agents into Telax via the Teleagent option with alternative phones

Improved communications during service disruptions - Introducing a new way for you to receive near-real time status updates of Telax services and planned maintenance activities. Specifically customers can view our services here : http://status.mycontactcenter.net Active incidents displayed at the top of the page inform you of any issues occurring with our system and their severity, immediately as they occur. Receive further system updates via email, SMS, and RSS easily by clicking the Subscribe to Updates button.
Telax has compiled a list of specific strategies that can be used to mitigate the impact in the event of an outage in any one of these key service areas. These strategies, however are created with the customer and or channel partners through a series of discussions.

Please contact your Telax Account team to start the discussion.