A recent study has thrown up a scary picture on the preparedness of call-centers in disaster management. According to the study less than 37% of the call centers globally are confident that they can survive a disaster or business disruption without seriously impacting their customers.

Many call centers are not taking the appropriate actions to minimize the impact of any disaster, if that occur. The majority of the companies have not invested in testing and monitoring equipment to tackle such issues before customers are affected.

Sponsored by Empirix, the study was conducted by advisory firm DMG Consulting. Titled 'Business as Usual? A Benchmarking Study of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity for Contact Centers,' the study focuses on call centers and their plans for maintaining business operations in the incidence of an emergency.

In the study covered nearly 200 contact centers from all over the world and analyzes how companies prepare for disasters to ensure that their contact center systems are optimized to meet service level agreements (SLAs).

The study says that among companies with an established process for disaster recovery, 63.3% of managers were less than confident that the process would produce the desired results in case of a serious outage.

Only 4.7% of the companies surveyed reported that they do regular and adequate testing, leaving 95.3% of companies represented in the survey open to a complete meltdown in the case of a disaster or extended outage. About 20% of contact centers responded that they do not even have a disaster recovery plan.

"While disasters are not something that contact centers can control, planning and testing can mitigate the impact on customers and business," said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting and the lead researcher. "Unfortunately, the majority of companies surveyed have not made adequate investments to prevent service disruptions to their mission critical service infrastructure."