HCL supplies quality professional staff of all grades and expertise to both the NHS and private medical sectors. A fast growing business, with a turnover in excess of £140 million, HCL attributes its success to the smooth integration of newly acquired businesses into the HCL Group.
Telephone communication plays a critical role in the recruitment and placement processes at HCL. Although inbound telephone calls only account for a sixth of all telephone activity, these calls are an essential part of the business, generally being from clients and new prospects. “Callers expect us to be constantly available and responsive,” says Harding. “Therefore it’s imperative that we have a telephone system that is flexible, resilient and always accessible.”
Taken for granted as being highly reliable, telecoms protection is often overlooked by many companies when considering business continuity planning. One of HCL’s subsidiary companies had already implemented a BCMLITE unit from GemaTech at one of its London offices following a serious power failure that occurred between the exchange and the office. “Construction workers had managed to cut through the power cables which fed our ISDN30 telecoms circuits during modernisation work in a building, leaving the office without telephone services for two days,” says Harding.
This critical power failure between the exchange and its offices prompted the review of inbound calls to this part of the business resulting in the adoption of a resilient business continuity solution from GemaTech. BCMLITE technology provides instantaneous and seamless recovery of 100% of incoming calls, directed to individual geographical DDIs, by intelligently re-routing them, on an individual DDI basis, to any other number, or series of numbers, allowing organisations to continue to operate in the event of a telecoms infrastructure failure.
“The GemaTech solution has provided us with more than just business continuity,” says Harding. “It has helped with our consolidation and relocation strategy enabling us to easily reroute calls from main numbers to new, or other offices within the Group.”