AGENCY MARKETING TECHNOLOGY
Creating a carefully thought-out disaster plan
is a necessary adjunct to conducting business
By Steve Anderson
The scope of a well-developed disaster plan should be much broader than simply ensuring that your computer systems will continue to function.
Agents rely on technology more than they have at any time in the past, so when they think about disaster planning, they tend to think about protecting the computer systems that they rely upon to service their customers. The events of September 11 heightened agencies' awareness of the importance of updating an existing plan--if they have one--or creating a plan if they don't. One of the most important things any agency can do is to think through a disaster plan and put it into place. An effective plan ensures an agency's ability to continue in business regardless of the type of catastrophe that might come its way.
Every agency faces potential disasters that are more wide-ranging than just the unavailability of its computer system. Potential natural disasters include fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, drought and extreme heat, lightning, wildfire, and snowstorms. Man-made disasters include terrorist acts, a hazardous material spill, death of a key employee, virus and/or hacker attack, embezzlement, riots, strikes, and dangerous or angry clients or employees. A well-developed plan should address each of these in terms of how they could affect an agency's ability to continue in business and what steps should be taken to mitigate the damage.
The scope of a well-developed disaster plan should be much broader than simply ensuring that your computer systems will continue to function. Much information is available to help you keep your systems running no matter what. As you are putting your plan together, some other elements that you should include are:
Take care of your employees. Because your customers can't be taken care of until your employees are taken care of, this should be your first priority. Exactly what needs to be done will depend on the type of catastrophes you could encounter and the area of the country where your agency is located. Your first step should be to make sure that employees and their families are safe. You may need to make arrangements for child care if there is a disaster that closes schools for a period of time. You may need to have extra cash available for everyday expenses and loans for longer-term needs. One Miami-area agency's plan includes a provision to bring in a masseuse to help relieve stress for employees handling a large volume of claims. Your employees are your most important resource. Make sure they are taken care of.
Maintain good customer relations. Let your customers know if you've had to relocate your office and how they can contact you. In the event of a fire's shutting down your office, have newspaper ads readily available that can be published on a moment's notice to let your customers know how they can get in touch with you. If there is a local disaster, use mapping software to plot the location of your customers so that you can be proactive and contact them first to find out if they need any help.
Maintain cash flow. Make sure that you have enough cash on hand to handle short-term needs. You may want to establish a line of credit for longer-term needs. Remember that when a disaster occurs, the focus will be on claims and customer service, so new business production may have to take a back seat for a period of time.
Protect vital information. Make sure that you have provisions for protecting and re-creating as necessary written and electronic information. This may be data in your computer databases but it will also include paper records. Think through what is absolutely vital to the continuation of your business and create a redundant backup system.
As you begin developing a disaster plan, some additional questions you should ask and make sure you have answers for include: What will you do if you are not able to use your normal work space? What will you do if you lose communications including cell phones? And how will you handle the loss of technology?
Most important, however, is that a good disaster plan will help you spell out how to prevent some disasters from occurring in the first place. If a disaster does occur, then the plan should help contain its impact. Having a written plan to rely on will help provide an organized response to the disaster as well as provide alternative ways to service your customers. Ultimately a good plan will prevent loss of market share and may even provide new prospects.
Developing a good plan is hard work. We suggest that you create a disaster management team made up of representatives from each department in the agency who are given the responsibility and authority to create the plan and continuously review it. A good plan will be workable, cost effective, flexible, easy to maintain, concise and consistent.
Is all this preparation worth the time and effort? Allow me to share a story that we have been able to personally verify. We met Chris, an employee of one of the Marsh business units, at a meeting in Washington, on September 20. His office was in one of the WTC towers. He was out of town when disaster struck on that Tuesday morning. The 300 others in his unit were able to evacuate. But, the data center was completely destroyed. Who could have ever imagined that airplanes would be flown into the towers and bring them crashing to the ground?
Fortuately, Marsh had a disaster plan and it was put into effect when their Applied WinTAM system was completely destroyed. Personnel at Applied in Chicago immediately ordered servers from Dell in Austin, Texas, to make arrangements to get the equipment to Chicago. The contact from Marsh was finally able to get in touch with Applied on Wednesday. A good data backup was available, and arrangements were made to drive the tapes to Chicago. The equipment and tapes arrived in Chicago, and the data was restored over the weekend onto servers in the TAMCentral data facility. By Sunday night, 100 users were able to use their system with an Internet connection. By Monday morning 300 employees were able to again service their customers.
You don't know what kind of disaster you could face in the next hour. Taking steps now to prepare a plan will save you headaches. More important though, it will save your business. *
The author
Steve Anderson has been a licensed insurance agent for more than 20 years. He is president of steveanderson.com, Inc., which provides products and services that help agents maximize profits using commonsense technology. He can
be reached by e-mail at steve@SteveAnderson.com or by phone at (615) 599-0085.