LAVERSTOKE, England, February 6 /PRNewswire/ -- The announcement that the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu has arrived in the United Kingdom may have come as a surprise to many - especially the way that it came out-of-the-blue and has had such a massive impact on one business in a relatively remote area. Hopefully the outbreak will be contained on this occasion, but government agencies and some businesses have been planning for the worst case: that pandemic erupts with potentially crippling effect on British industry. NewVoiceMedia has released a paper "Preparing Your Call Centre for Flu Pandemic", which is available as a free download from www.newvoicemedia.com.

For many businesses the call centre is the link to their customers. When a pandemic strikes, both the call centre agents and their customers will be badly affected - businesses should be planning ahead to mitigate the impact. With careful planning and proactive arrangements set in place to allow flexibility of working practices, work can continue. The paper discusses the models the effect of a flu pandemic on call centres and the population in general. It outlines the likely rates of infection and loss of availability for work; the effect on commercial models and economic activity as customers stop interacting; and highlights the need for a flexible call centre infrastructure that would enable the migration of centralised call centres to a distributed model where the workload can be moved in hours to agents working from home.

NewVoiceMedia's hosted telephony platform can act as an 'overlay' solution to any existing infrastructure. A hosted approach means that it can be scaled up or down during the crisis; that agents can work at home to avoid infection; and that callers can be handled automatically or to be put through to an appropriate agency. The system is web-configurable in real-time by call centre managers who may also be working from home and is based on resilient computers that themselves need little or no human support, thus maintaining a reliable service at all times.

About NewVoiceMedia

NewVoiceMedia provides its customers with off-the-shelf applications such as virtual contact centres, call routing, conferencing, voicemail, automated data collection, card payment services, and our partners with the most powerful hosted architecture and flexible Dynamic CTI-enabled modules to enhance their own product portfolios.

Press contact: Neil Kirtley, Tel: +44-(0)800-280-2888, neil.kirtley@newvoicemedia.com

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