Dimension Data has joined forces with CCH Hosted Services to provide a failsafe disaster recovery and business continuity solution for users of the award winning Enterprise Interaction Centre (EIC) communications centre platform.
CCH Hosting Services is to set up a fully operational EIC call centre at its disaster recovery facility in Midrand, the cost of which will be syndicated among participating EIC users.
Should anything happen to their own EIC installation, they would be able to transfer their entire call centre operation - including their own telephone numbers, specialist applications and a pre-determined number of agents - to the facility and go live within 30 minutes.
Because the Midrand facility is networked to similar CCH Hosted Services sites in Durban and Cape Town, EIC users in those cities can make use of the disaster recovery platform as well.
And an incident which knocks out the call centre can happen at any time.
According to Tim Stanley, sales manager, Business Recovery Services at CCH Hosted Services, it need not involve a "spectacular disaster" such as a flood, fire or explosion. Indeed, these incidents accounted for only 3% of all business infrastructure disasters in SA over the past three years.
"The most common cause of disasters - around 76% - stem from hardware or software failures, many of which result from accidental human intervention such as loading on new software which causes the entire system to crash or failure to back-up critical application files which have to be reinstalled.
"However an increasing number of disasters are caused by malicious damage inflicted by disgruntled employees - a situation which is accelerating as companies downsize - as well as theft," he adds.
Nicholas Slack, national sales director: Call Centre Solutions, at Dimension Data Interactive says research has shown that most call centres have a "downtime tolerance" of between two and four hours. Thereafter, downtime will impact significantly on bottom-line business as customers who can`t get through to the call centre, start phoning the competition.
"For a company which actively sells its products and services via the call centre - such as an airline, a courier service or a ticket reservations operation - call centre downtime is dead-time," he adds.
According to Slack, the EIC call centre platform, developed by US-based Interactive Intelligence, has taken the SA call centre market by storm.
Introduced to SA just 18 months ago, there are currently over 1 100 EIC seats installed in call centres and back offices of companies involved in a broad cross-section of industries around the country. These range from managed health care and motorist roadside assistance, to insurance, gambling, entertainment and travel, manufacturing, distribution and technology service provision.
"As with all call centres, there has been growing recognition among EIC users of the critical importance of their call centres to their business. As businesses become more customer focused, the call centre has migrated from being a `nice to have` helpdesk which generates little or no income, to being the revenue engine of an increasingly large number of organisations.
"For most, the impact on their bottom line - and their customer`s lives in some instances - if the call centre was out of action for a few hours or days could be enormous.
"A disaster can happen to any organisation. Just as businesses insure their tangible assets against occurrences as fire and theft, they must also ensure that the business is able to keep on operating in the event of a disaster. The alliance between Dimension Data and CCH Hosted Services will enable our EIC customers to do just that," Slack concludes.
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Dimension Data
Dimension Data is a leading global network services and i-Commerce solutions provider, focused on enabling enterprises, telecommunications service providers and new economy companies to communicate and transact effectively in an e-enabled environment.
Listed on the London Stock Exchange, Dimension Data is ranked in FTSE 100 and operates in over 30 countries on six continents. The Group has achieved a compound annual growth rate in US dollars of 78% in revenue and 38% in basic earnings per share over the past two years.
EIC
EIC, which is supplied and supported in SA by Dimension Data, is an easy-to-use, Windows NT server-based system which unifies the processes of telephony, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), fax, e-mail and Internet interactions on a single Windows NT server. This enables all telephony functions to be utilised across an enterprise LAN, WAN and the Internet and allows the enterprise to become the call centre.