Global lockdown restrictions turned many businesses into remote operations almost overnight, which affected every aspect of their organizations, including their contact centers. Though telephony services are a vital part of any department's communications, they are a fundamental component of contact center operations.
For one such customer, mobilizing its call center operations became a very real challenge. As lockdown measures came into force, they like many others, had to adapt quickly and implement remote working for all of their contact center agents to ensure a level of business continuity and customer service.
The situation
The call center operation used a hosted PBX for telephony, which was connected to a Session Border Controller (SBC) in Pure IP’s Managed Voice network using a SIP trunk. In this set-up, neither set of equipment was exposed to the wider internet, so it provided secure communications to their office.
When local lockdown restrictions required that the customer’s call agents operate as a remote team, they realized that they would need Pure IP’s help reconfiguring their telephony to work outside of their office environment.
The challenge
The challenge our technical support team then faced was to propose and execute a solution that would restore the customer’s telephony capabilities without compromising on data security, as quickly as possible.
The key requirements were:
-
-
- Replacing the customer’s desk phones with a software client
- Devising an alternate network design to accommodate the dynamic IP addresses used by user home routers – as these rotated, they could not be granted access to internal networks in the same way
- Minimizing their downtime by deploying a simple, efficient solution
-
Our customer’s end goal was to bring their agents back online as soon as possible, so as well as identifying a suitable software client, our team needed to generate log-in credentials, and distribute detailed installation and configuration guides to the customer’s users.
Our solution
Due to strict security policies we were unable to open up our network to the home routers. Their dynamic (ie. changing) IP addresses present a potential security risk, as in essence it means opening the network to the whole internet.
In situations like these, our voice engineers can take advantage of our cloud-based SBC, which provides an endpoint for call routing that doesn’t expose internal networks.
As a software agnostic provider, we have access to a wide variety of systems to test our solutions, including a range of software clients. Our team’s familiarity with the software enabled us to efficiently select the right software for the task, create log-in credentials, and write a step-by-step guide for users including screenshots, with detailed instructions for everything they needed to do to re-enable their telephony.
Having agreed on the approach with the customer, the engineers configured and deployed the solution, before sending out user manuals and supporting the customer with the transition. Together we were able to bring all the, now remote, call agents back online within just a few hours!
