Emergency Call Center

[Armstrong2012]

Hello,

I work for a small university and am looking for suggestions on an emergency call center solution. For example, say a crisis event were to happen on campus and there are an influx of calls. Does anyone know of a good service provider that would be able to handle the overflow of calls and give information to the callers?

Thanks for your help.

 

[trvlr1]

Most providers should be able to set you up with a number to publish for these kinds of events. Better it was not in your system but on theirs so a huge influx of calls does not use up all your phone lines. They could provide you with an announcement box that you record pertenant information to and they allow multiple lines in to it for the influx of calls. This of course will cost you, depending on the format you want, and it will be continuous billing every month as you never know when such an emergency will happen. You will have to publish the number too, so you would have to determine who would get such a number, parents, press, anyone etc.
Putting it on your system means you have to have someone to man it, have the phones and lines available to manage such an event, or have some way to manage the whole scenario at a moments notice.

Hope this helps.

 

[Armstrong2012]

Maybe service provider was not the best choice of words. I did not mean like AT&T or some other carrier. I was referring to a 3rd party that could provide a 1-800 number to take the calls and relay important information to people, not a recording. I could set up a simple announcement with our Avaya system if I wanted now but that is not what I want.

 

[phoneguy610]

We have a doctors office that pays an answering service

If their que gets too full it overflows to an outside answering service (which is not cheap but it works)

ddcommllc.com
Avaya/Toshiba/SyntelSolutions

ACIS

"Will work for stars

 

[trvlr1]

I would say your first stop is still your local provider, to see if they can give you a solution, many do have call centers that they use for emergency coverage for all kinds of things.

 

[macphoneguy]

I would hav to echo the Last conversation, I would see a couple parts, 1 is the service provider, and howmany lines/trunks/channels are there, 2 is the equipment, to talk to the Lines/trunks, plug into, then Looking at sample problems to say XYZ happens would we have the capacity, and how many Physical Phones, Queing calls Etc