IPSCAPE’S Cloud Contact Centre Technology Delivers Lifeline’s Disaster Recovery Strategy

Posted: 21 May 2012

ipSCAPE has been selected by Lifeline Australia to deliver a cloud based disaster recovery solution which ensures 24/7 availability of their national crisis support helpline in the case of a national breakdown of their regular service.

 

Somewhere in Australia there is a new call to Lifeline every minute, so ensuring its national helpline can continue to function when unplanned incidents such as technology outages and natural disasters occur is critical. With ipSCAPE’s cloud solution in place, Lifeline can keep taking calls from people in crisis, even if its on-premise contact centre technology fails or volunteer counsellors are unable to travel to a Lifeline Centre to take calls.

 

The contact centre managing the national crisis support helpline is mission critical to Lifeline’s operations so ensuring a robust fail-safe was crucial. However, replicating Lifeline’s existing on premise contact centre technology was prohibitively expensive. In response ipSCAPE offered a cost effective cloud solution which can be activated in minutes and had a greater flexibility to respond to different emergency scenarios. ipSCAPE’s system provides all the features and functionality that Lifeline enjoys with its existing on premise system, which also ensures continuity in business operations.

 

Lifeline can now switch allocated volunteer crisis supporters over to the ipSCAPE solution in a matter of minutes. The cloud platform allows volunteers to take calls from any location in Australia with a phone line and Internet connection. It also means Lifeline can update its Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology with new messages in minutes. So rather than not being able to get through to Lifeline, callers can now be informed and updated about the hotline’s technical problems and assured their call will be answered as quickly as possible. The technology also has the capability to flag calls with safety issues that can be traced by emergency services.

 

For Lifeline, the inherent flexibility of ipSCAPE’s solution means avoiding the expensive costs associated with traditional disaster recovery solutions. For example, Lifeline does not need to invest considerable resource in maintaining a second physical back-up contact centre. In addition the highly intuitive ipSCAPE interface means Lifeline does not need to dedicate significant resource to training volunteers on how to use a different system.

 

“We take over 1,400 calls from Australians in need each day so ensuring they can reach a crisis support volunteer at any time, day or night, is essential,” Lifeline’s CIO Sajid Hassan said today “The solution we have in place from ipSCAPE ensures we can avoid downtime in a cost effective way. We are confident that by having our disaster recovery with ipSCAPE, our staff and volunteers can be up and running again within minutes causing little to no disruption to Australians in crisis.”

 

Simon Burke, CEO of ipSCAPE, said: “For Lifeline, the ability to maintain a robust and reliable telephone service is a number one priority. Lifeline’s decision to move its disaster recovery solution into the cloud demonstrates how the increasing maturity of the market is enabling the use of cloud-based solutions for mission critical services.”

 

“As our technology is hosted in the cloud, all ipSCAPE’s customers by default have a robust, agile, and cost effective disaster recovery solution in place – which they don’t pay any extra for. The Lifeline case study also demonstrates how organisations with traditional technology investments can still leverage the agility and cost efficiencies of cloud for their disaster recovery solution.”

 

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