The investment will enable the University to expand its existing call centre application which is used by a number of schools and departments including IT support, an onsite NHS health centre, a marketing enquiry centre and finance and payroll departments. In addition, the new solution provides instantaneous and seamless re-routing of all incoming calls as part of a new disaster recovery strategy.
Since its formation in 1881, the University of Nottingham has established itself as a leading authority in research, teaching and learning both in the UK and South East Asia. However, its top ten ranking in the UK is largely the result of the University’s ability to deliver full scale support services alongside its high quality education programmes, which includes the provision of 140 operators or agents managing 14 different help-lines on a 24-hour basis to its 36,000 students and 6,500 members of staff.
The call centre solution provides the infrastructure which allows Nottingham to operate the help-lines and the new expansion will improve the resilience of the campus wide network, as well as providing for failover/fallback systems in the case of some kind 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. Anthony Tunley, Telecoms Group Leader at the University, explains, “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. 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 continues, “The great thing about the NEC Philips solution is that it enables us to develop and evolve our offering in line with our needs and the needs of our users. It is also easy to manage and upgrade, with the current major system upgrade taking only two days to install ‘out of hours’, with absolutely no disruption to our level of service provision.”
Commenting on the relationship with NEC Philips, Tunley concludes, “NEC Philips is a long-standing partner of the University of Nottingham and we have an excellent working relationship with them. The technical team have been working with us since 1992 to keep us abreast of the latest technology and it shows.”