Creating the Census 2013 "Pop-up" Contact Centre
So how does a New Zealand contact centre make space for over 200 additional staff to take a massive hit of additional phone calls over predominantly a 3 day period? Oh, and there is to be no disruption to the existing work handled by the centre….
That was the challenge that Telnet’s IS team was given around 18 months ago when Telnet won the contract to once again provide contact centre services for the New Zealand census.
There were many things on our to-do list from making sure there were enough telephone lines, server capacity through to network and even internet bandwidth that made this something other than your normal contact centre project. The bigger challenge though – at least from a systems and resource perspective – was “where do we put everyone?”
Our home for the 2013 Census |
Indeed without our partners, and their engagement and excitement about this project (and them coming up with quite a few non-standard, outside the box ways for us to buy/hire/use their products or services) there is no way we could have pulled this off. Throughout this post I’ll mention a few of those key providers – not because they are paying us – but as my small way of saying thanks for all their help!
Stamford Plaza provided the space for us to work; their in house AV team from Spyglass worked their magic providing the not in significant supply of power to all the desks and Vector Communications handled the job of providing fibre services to connect our voice and data networks back to HQ. Next step was to install kit to all the desks; almost 1.5km of network patch leads, NEC IP Phones, Power over Ethernet(PoE) network switches and lots and lots of HP Laptops and power supplies!
One or two laptops.... |
One of our UPS units along with our "Core" switch |
"Snapshot" stats display |
Thanks to some pre-work, we had the contact centre live and taking calls within a couple of hours of us getting access to the room. Over the rest of that day, and the next two days, we fully set up the rest of the centre, moving staff to each newly configured set of workstations to give them some real world use before the big census day. We set up a projector and stats display (Using the Zeacom Snapshot product) so the whole centre could see the calls we were receiving, but more importantly, keeping our contact centre supervisors “heads up” and walking the floor, rather than tied to their desks watching the screen.
The Pop-Up Centre in full flow |
By the end of the “day-after-census” we were starting deconstruction. A day and a half, and a lot of packing, cable coiling, de-gaffa-taping and stacking later, we’d turned our contact centre back into three pallets of kit to go back to storage or our various suppliers. It was an awesome ride, and we’re proud to have been the supplier of services to such an important project as the NZ Census.
If you’d like to hear more about our story, or maybe even have a need for something like this yourself then drop us a line. In the mean time though, here are some of the people we'd like to thank, and a selection of photos from the pop-up Census 2013 contact centre at the Stamford Plaza.
Steve Hennerley,
GM Information Systems
Steve Hennerley,
GM Information Systems
A big thanks to all our partners! |
Labels: Business Continuity, call centres, contact centres, IT, Octopus, recruitment, telecommunications