How Louisiana-based Golfballs.com will guard against future hurricanes

After Hurricane Katrina impacted its phone and e-mail service, Lafayette, LA-based Golfballs.com lost 15% of its September revenue. But the retailer is taking several steps to assure business continuity in the next hurricane, CEO Tom Cox tells Internet Retailer.

Cox, who had already been planning to arrange for back-up outsourced call center operations to accommodate growing sales, now will also use the extra service as part of disaster recovery plan to assure uninterrupted customer service whenever emergencies like Katrina impact local operations, he says.

To keep up e-mail contact with customers, Golfballs is re-locating its StrongMail Systems e-mail server to Seattle, where it also maintains support operations for its sales through Amazon.com, Cox says. “It doesn’t matter where we e-mail from, so it might as well come from a place that doesn’t have hurricanes,” he says.

With its site server protected in an off-site location, Golfballs.com operated uninterrupted throughout the recent hurricanes. “Our web site never went down, it’s bunkered in a data center off-site,” Cox says. But with the weather knocking out regional telephone switches as well as its e-mail server, it was tough to maintain contact with customers for a couple of weeks, he says.

Golfballs has also invested in a permanent generator as an alternate power source for critical systems in its Lafayette headquarters, including its printing machines for personalizing products with customer names and logos, and it is looking into arranging for back-up, out-of-state telephone service that could instantly switch calls to other lines when local service is out.

“With an investment of about $20,000 or $30,000, we can protect ourselves,” Cox says, adding that his headquarters is already located in a secure commercial building with few windows. “There’s no question we’ll be better prepared next time,” he says.