Business Continuity Plan

Business Continuity Plan (BCP) provides a secondary CXone Mpower system as a backup. You can switch to this backup system when you experience issues with your primary system. For example, you could experience an outage, regional failure, or planned maintenance. BCP helps you minimize the impact of unforeseen events. It also ensures that you maintain essential operations during such events. Your organization must opt in to BCP for each CXone Mpower tenant High-level organizational grouping used to manage technical support, billing, and global settings for your CXone Mpower system..

Business Continuity Plan must be set up by your CXone Mpower Account Representative. After initial setup, you can start syncing data from your primary system to the secondary, BCP system. This lets you quickly switch to the BCP system if an emergency arises, like an outage. When you switch to the BCP system:

• Contact The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center. traffic automatically begins routing to the BCP system. However, Business Continuity Plan currently only supports the voice channel Various voice and digital communication mediums that facilitate customer interactions in a contact center..

• The sync process pauses, ensuring that no data is lost or overwritten in the BCP system.

• When users log in, they are redirected to the BCP system. They can check which system they're logged in to, to be sure which one they're working in.

When to Switch to a BCP System

You control when you switch from your primary to BCP system. If an issue arises, you're not obligated to wait or work with NiCE Support. Business Continuity Plan was designed to help you continue business operations during disasters. However, you could choose to switch at any time, like if a service is slow or unstable.

You can sign up for platform status alerts in the CXone Mpower Customer Community . You may want to identify a specific BCP administrator who signs up for these alerts. These can help you react quickly during emergency scenarios where you want to switch to the BCP system.

Switching to the BCP system is a manual process; if an outage or emergency occurs, CXone Mpower does not automatically switch to your BCP system. In the event you are unable to switch to the BCP system, your Account Representative can do so for you.

Synchronization Between Systems

After Business Continuity Plan is enabled, you must initiate data synchronization. This syncs data like users and points of contact The entry point that an inbound contact uses to initiate an interaction, such as a phone number or email address. to the BCP system. Data syncs from the primary to the BCP system. This ensures that your BCP system is up-to-date when you need it. It also makes administration easier since you only need to administer your primary system. Also, if you switch to the BCP system, the sync does not occur. This is because the primary system is inactive; it also means your BCP setup will not change when it's enabled.

Currently, data syncs on a daily basis. When you enable the sync, your system performs the synchronization each day at the same time that you enabled the sync.

Data That Can Be Synced

The following table shows which data can be synced, and which application the data comes from:

ACD	Admin	Studio
Agent Settings (ACD Users)	Roles	Files
Business Unit Settings	Teams	Scripts
Dispositions	Users (Employees)
Hours of Operation
Points of Contact (voice)
Skills

You can choose to enable a default or custom sync. A default sync includes all available data. A custom sync lets you control which data you do or do not want to sync.

Entity Correlations

When data syncs to the BCP system, the IDs do not necessarily remain the same. Despite that, the correlation between entities on both systems is maintained when data syncs to the BCP system. For example, the user Ichabod Crane is assigned the role of Administrator - Sleepy Hollow. The user ID of Ichabod Crane is not necessarily the same in both the primary and BCP systems. The role ID of Administrator - Sleepy Hollow is also not the same. Even though the IDs are not the same, Ichabod Crane still has the same role in both the primary and BCP systems.

Because the IDs of entities in the BCP system are not the same, this impacts your Studio scripts. When a script syncs, it retains any unique IDs you've used in the script. For example, you may have referenced a specific skill ID in the script. In this scenario, the script would be referencing the ID of the skill in your primary system. This means you need to update any unique IDs in the BCP version of the script.

The Set Up Business Continuity Plan page has a checklist to help script developers update scripts.

User Access and Syncing

All users are synced to the BCP tenant, but access to the tenant is controlled per user with the BCP Type setting. This setting in the CXone Mpower employee profile lets you define BCP tenant login rights for each user. You can choose between three types of:

• No Access: The user account does not have access to the BCP tenant. By default, all employees have no access.

• Single Access: The user account can only access whichever tenant is active. So, they can only log in to the BCP tenant when you've switched to the BCP tenant and it's active.

• Multiple Access: The user account can choose which tenant to log in to. This type of access should be given to administrators, who you want to be able to log in to the BCP tenant at any time. These users will have an updated login page. When logging in, a selector will let them choose between the primary and BCP tenant. This selector will also show which tenant is currently active. This will help them easily know whether the BCP tenant is active or not.

Access is given to each individual employee; you cannot give access at the team or role level. You can give access to many users at one time with the employee bulk upload process. Or, you can edit an individual employee profile on the BCP tab.

You may want to limit access to specific users for the following reasons:

• Currently, only the voice channel is supported in the BCP system, so you only need enough agents to handle your voice contacts.

• The number of users you give access to the BCP system may have billing implications. For example, you may not want 10,000 user accounts constantly sitting in your BCP tenant. Contact your Account Representative for more information about billing.

Considerations for Voice Points of Contact

Keep in mind the following about your voice channel in your BCP system:

• Only voice points of contact The entry point that an inbound contact uses to initiate an interaction, such as a phone number or email address. that you sync to your BCP system can continue to function when you switch to the BCP system.

• When you switch to your BCP system, only voice points of contact in the BCP system continue functioning.

  • When you switch to the BCP system, your primary system is inactive, including those voice points of contact.

  • After switching to the BCP system, calls route through the BCP server cluster.

  • If your primary server cluster had an outage, then comes back online while you're using your BCP system, your voice calls still route through the BCP server cluster. Also, the voice points of contact in your primary stay inactive since BCP is enabled.

  • If your primary server cluster had an outage, then comes back online while you're using your BCP system, you don't automatically switch back to the primary system. You must manually switch between systems.

• If you deactivate a point of contact within 12 hours of the sync process, this update may not sync until the next day.

Impact on CXone Mpower Users

• Your users likely cannot log in to your primary system. This depends on the situation, like whether there is an outage or maintenance, and whether you've switched over to the BCP system. If you've switched to the BCP system, then users with Single Access or Multiple Access can log in. Types of access are explained in the User Access and Syncing section of this page.

• If users are actively logged in and handling a contact The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center. when a disaster occurs, the interaction continues unless there is a complete outage or outage for that channel Various voice and digital communication mediums that facilitate customer interactions in a contact center..

• After you've switched to the BCP system, users need to log out and log back in again to continue handling contacts.

  • Voice contacts route to the BCP system, so they need to switch to the BCP system.

  • The login experience changes, depending on the user's level of access:

    • Users with Multiple Access see a system selector.

    • Users with Single Access are automatically directed to the login page for the BCP system.

    • Users with No Access are unable to log in.

• Depending on the CXone Mpower features and products you have set up, users may notice that certain features aren't available. This is because your BCP system is meant to let you handle emergencies. It's not meant to be a complete copy of your primary system.

Quality Assurance for a BCP System

• The BCP system is kept in a "warm" state. This means it's always ready for you to switch over to it.

• Security and performance are consistent for your primary and BCP system. The BCP system is backed by the same service level agreement (SLA) as your primary .

• NiCE provides the same technical support for both the primary and BCP system.

• The BCP system is hosted in a different region than your primary system. This ensures that regional issues don't impact your ability to continue business operations.