UK Call Centre Voice Networks – Resiliency and Call Quality are Paramount.
Resiliency and call quality are paramount
The ability to make and receive telephone calls is something that many of us take for granted, however, good practice should dictate that every contact centre carries out a full and thorough investigation into the resiliency of their telecoms provider to ensure that if a problem occurs, the ability of the call centre to continue operating isn’t significantly compromised. Even if your ability to make and receive telephone calls isn’t impacted, the degradation of call quality could have an equal impact on the operation of the call centre as a total telecoms outage. For the reasons specified above, it is of critical importance that questions about redundancy and resiliency are asked of your telecoms provider, and questions about the overall resiliency of your call centre are asked. Below are some examples of the types of questions that you need ask of your telecoms suppliers, and the types of action you should take to ensure resiliency:
Do your providers host their equipment in multiple data centres?
Whilst data centres are built with resiliency in mind, there is still a possibility of power or connectivity failing. Therefore, it is essential that any provider that you consider using has replicated infrastructure hosted in multiple data centres to make sure that they are not impacted in the event of a data centre outage.
Does your provider route calls over one carrier?
If any provider routes calls over a single carrier, then they may have a single point of failure on their network as a result. If there is a degradation of call quality, or that carrier fails completely, then your call centre operation would be severely impacted. Therefore, it is recommended that you establish what carriers your supplier uses.
What are your providers SLA’s for fault resolution?
Many providers will offer service level agreements that specify timescales for the acknowledgement and resolution of any faults that occur on the network. You should ensure that your provider offers SLAs, and that you are comfortable with the timescales specified within them.
Implement some non geographic numbers
Due to the fact that non geographic numbers can be controlled via online applications and re-routed instantly, they are a fantastic option for resilience and disaster recovery. For example, if you experienced a complete telecoms service outage, you would be able to re-route your inbound calls to alternative numbers, or the mobile phones of your agents quickly and efficiently to ensure you aren’t adversely impacted. It is important to ensure that your provider for non geographic numbers isn’t the same as your landline provider in order to avoid any outages of both sets of numbers.