Experian retains seamless customer service thanks to Phoenix
Challenge
Experian, the leading global information services company, needed to quickly relocate 365 members of staff from six sites within Nottingham, and return to normal service within four hours. In order to do this it turned to Phoenix, one of the UK’s leading providers of hosting, cloud and managed IT services.
Solution
From its operational headquarters in Nottingham, Experian employs approximately 3,000 people across six sites in the UK. Experian’s contact centre staff is core to its ability to provide a responsive service to clients, supporting both consumer and corporate credit services. It therefore has more than 300 work area recovery seats available within four hours of an incident at Phoenix’s Nottingham centre for both call centre and back office staff.
Edward Sherley-Price, head of business continuity at Experian, explains: “The location of Phoenix’s business continuity centre is ideal for us. Should our offices become unavailable, the centre is on a city tram stop, near a motorway junction and has plenty of parking. It means that our staff can carry on work without disruption and get there in the usual way that they commute.”
Experian has call centre positions at the Nottingham business continuity centre. Its Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) system replicates what call centre staff use back at their office. This system automatically balances the use of phone lines, ensures calls are routed to the correct person and also allows Experian to record messages and gather user statistics.
“During an invocation you want to ensure that the business and its people are disrupted as little as possible so that our customers continue to receive a smooth and excellent service.”
“A major bonus about this business continuity centre solution is that it allows our call centre team to get back up and running rapidly, using a system with which they are already very familiar,” continues Edward.
To ensure that Experian can resume business quickly, a further 45 seats at the business continuity centre allows key back office staff to relocate during an invocation. When Experian re-signed its contract with Phoenix, these were additional seats that exceeded the Nottingham site’s capacity. Another suite of seats was therefore built, and meanwhile Experian has access to Phoenix’s next nearest continuity centre.
Edward continues: “In my experience, this type of flexibility is rare and it is refreshing to work with a supplier that puts customer needs first.”
To ensure that staff are well practised in how they get to the business continuity centre and what happens once they get there, the Experian team conducts three tests per year. Each test involves approximately 100 staff who relocate to the centre to do a day’s work. The floor plan they hold ensures that staff are working from the correct position. A fixed high-speed comms line between Experian and Phoenix ensures that desktop data can be quickly ported onto the business continuity centre PCs to enable staff to start work quickly.
“Previously the PC build process took a long time and was quite manually intensive, however thanks to Phoenix’s technical advice we are now reviewing a system which automatically images the PC’s and allocates individual user IDs to every machine. Phoenix made no charge for this advice, but it’s another example of how their engineers always go above and beyond. For us it means that users can now log on straight away and for the IT team is one less fiddly headache that saves us essential time when under pressure to recover fully within four hours,” says Edward.
Experian also has 25 other sites across the UK, some of which are supported by their local Phoenix business continuity centres.
Edward continues: “Working with Phoenix across the UK means that we don’t have to invest in a major comms network of our own to deliver an effective business continuity service. If another Experian site has to relocate to a Phoenix business continuity centre then we use our dedicated link into Phoenix’s Nottingham site to re-route data to the appropriate continuity centre elsewhere in the UK. Working with Phoenix reassures us of a high level of service resumption during invocation.”
“Although Phoenix has all the vital buildings, IT systems and compliance requirements in place, what is also key for us is the chemistry with our service suppliers. Phoenix is always willing to go that extra mile to accommodate our evolving business need and it’s always about focusing on the moment to get the job done. We therefore have great confidence that if we ever invoke we will have excellent support from them,” concluded Edward.
About Experian
Experian is the leading global information services company, providing data and analytical tools to clients in more than 80 countries. The company helps businesses to manage credit risk, prevent fraud, target marketing offers and automate decision-making. Experian also helps individuals to check their credit report and credit score, and protect against identity theft.
About Phoenix
We take a business-led approach to align your business needs to the right IT solution, enabling you to drive innovation and improve service, at a lower cost and with reduced risk to operations. You can choose from individual services or a complete approach: Managed Hosting & Cloud Services; Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery; Managed IT Services; Networking & Unified Communications; Professional Services; and Product Supply. Whatever challenge you need to overcome, Phoenix makes it possible.
