Discovery Health, South Africa`s leading health insurer, has contracted with CCH Hosted Services for disaster recovery hosting of its nine call centres. The initial contract is for 90 seats at Midrand-based CCH Hosted Services` disaster recovery facility, making it the largest site of its kind in the country.
Discovery Health, with 700 000 members, has one of South Africa`s largest call centre facilities. Its nine call centres employ 330 agents and take 270 000 calls a month, addressing the various business units: customer service, medical management, vitality, intermediary services, provider services, debit order management, chronic illness benefits, custom business and Discovery Link.
Riccardo Giletti, divisional manager of call centre solutions for Discovery Health, says the call centres are utterly mission-critical.
"Our business demands instant customer access and would suffer tremendously if our call centres were unavailable for any reason, and we were unable to take calls. We have virtually replicated our call centres at CCH Hosted Services, including our Magic and Applix applications, and our custom-written applications, our Oracle database and Lucent telephone infrastructure. CCH met our needs by installing a Lucent switch at a cost of more than R1 million - a level of commitment which impressed us," says Giletti.
CCH and Discovery Health perform frequent tests and have done a number of simulations, and have shown they can have agents on-site in 45 minutes, and have the site live in four hours. "We could keep ourselves running for some time," says Giletti, "by assigning the highest priority to the most mission-critical business units. But, in order to have the disaster recovery call centre more accurately reflect our actual setup, we will be installing further seats over time."
CCH Hosted Services director Frederick Castleman quotes recently published figures from UK-based disaster recovery and business continuity services providers that predict that without a tested plan, 40% of organisations will collapse outright in the event of a disaster. Of the rest, a further 40% will fail in 18 months and 12% in five years. On the whole, only 8% will survive in the long-term. "This makes it imperative for organisations such as Discovery Health to have their critical systems fully replicated. The damage done to a company, through a downtime and dent to their image and lost revenue, can hardly be measured.
"Our function is to give clients the ability to continue business functionality and to allow employees to work as efficiently and comfortably as they would at the original place of work. In addition, it is vital to a company`s call centre that its clients do not notice any change in service," Castleman notes.
CCH Hosted Services` business continuity solutions are supported by a world-class IT environment and its centres are designed in accordance with the latest disaster recovery principles, a significant departure from traditional disaster recovery services. It is the largest commercial provider of business continuity services across all major computer architectures in the Southern Hemisphere.
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