Dream scenario as Sykes ensures disasters won't mean a crisis for call centres

Published on Saturday 21 June 2008 15:19

SYKES Global Services, which runs call and contact centres for multi-national companies, has developed a disaster recovery programme that it can run at virtually no cost and with minimal staff time.

Branded Dream, an acronym for "disaster recovery electronic automated mechanism", it provides back-up in the event of a crisis, such as a major power cut.

It was built by Factonomy, an Edinburgh software design specialist, but was the brainchild of Sykes' Les Torrance and Alice Menzies.

Edinburgh-based Sykes, which runs centres for a number of global firms, including mobile phone companies and financial services groups, used to spend more than 2,343 man hours on updating its previous disaster recover plan. This has been reduced to 13 hours, equivalent to a 99.5% improvement and a cut in costs from 58,000 to 660.

Menzies said: "An update to the old disaster recovery plan, such as the addition of a new call centre location, would previously have taken me up to six weeks to make the myriad changes. It's unlikely that this job would now take more than a couple of minutes."

Dream's suite of data allows Sykes to reinstate normal business with minimum delay following a crisis. Sykes explained that it acts for one client with more than a thousand agents in six centres and the potential downtime after a problem could have been catastrophic, both in terms of cost and its relationship with the client.

Sykes claims it is a pioneer in the areas of disaster recovery and that no other system is as advanced.