Managing During Disasters

You may have the best staff in world, you may have the best technology money can buy, you may have an unlimited budget, but when a disaster strikes, you better be prepared.

I learned a hard lesson yesterday, our phone system and the internet went down, and we were not reachable. Imagine being in the customer service business and your customers can’t reach you, what effect does an issue like this have on your customers and your business reputation.

Being in Saudi Arabia, I wasn’t at all prepared do deal with such a disaster. We called the phone company but more than 24 hours passed and we were still without phones. I thought something like this would be rare in today’s technologically advanced world, but I know now that I have to deal with facts and never assume anything.

We don’t have a disaster recovery plan, so what do we do to get back to our normal operation?

I had to act fast and my staff made huge efforts to keep things in running order.

This incident made me come up with some quick resolutions and put the “disaster recovery plan” on top of my “things to do” list.

We were able to manage by:

1- Making an extensive use of cell phones: although you can never use cell phones to run a business, not yet at least, we had to resort to our cell phones to stay in touch with our customers. We contacted out main clients and informed them about the situation. I asked the site manager to start to call all customers who have pending issues, to inform them about our status and assure them that we are on top of things.
2- One of our managers has a relative who holds a high position with the phone company so we asked him to get his contact involved and try to expedite a fix for our phone system.
3- I made sure all the staff was on location each day with a cell phone.
4- We hired our own electrician to check the phone lines, as we were waiting for the phone company technician to arrive.
5- I was on hand for any extra help.

Although this disaster was not hard to over come, it really alerted me to have a good communication system in place under a bigger disaster recovery plan. I already have a plan to make a solid “disaster recovery plan”, but I never felt the urgency to include a plan on how to keep work flowing while our phone system and internet were out.

We discussed an alternate phone system or internet connection, we can use mobile internet as a back up for our wired LAN. We need to keep good call back numbers for all our clients in case we have to initiate the contact. We will also consider including a mobile phone number in our company contact numbers in the instance of our land line malfunctioning. Also, we designated another location for our technicians if everything else fails.

This was a fast resolution for an unexpected problem; a fully detailed disaster recovery plan is a must for any organization. Many people may think “oh I am sure they have a good back up plan”, but you will be surprised by how many, large and small organizations, who don’t have a solid disaster recovery or back up plan in place.