News

U Nottingham Call Center Bolsters Apps To Strengthen Disaster Recovery

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/22/09

The University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom has implemented new call center technology from NEC Philips Unified Solutions. The upgrade enables the university to expand its existing call center application, which is used by a number of schools and departments including IT support, an onsite NHS health center, a customer service center, and finance and payroll departments. In addition, the new implementation provides re-routing of all incoming calls as part of a new disaster recovery strategy.

The university has 140 operators and agents managing 14 different help-lines on a 24-hour basis to 36,000 students and 6,500 staff members. The new expansion will improve the resilience of the campus wide network, as well as provide for failover/fallback systems in the case of disaster or system failure.

Recent research and risk assessment at the university had highlighted the need for such a disaster recovery solution to ensure its operation in case of a system outage, according to Anthony Tunley, telecoms group leader at the university. "The communication between our various schools and departments is a key aspect of our success, and we are constantly reviewing how we deliver these services to our students, staff, and business partners alike. These people expect us to be constantly available and responsive, especially on our help-lines," he said. "As such, it is imperative that our communications and IT infrastructure is flexible, resilient, always accessible, and provides the operational services that will manage the help-line systems for us."

Tunley said the system upgrade took two days to install, "with absolutely no disruption to our level of service provision."