BCH Digital call on Zen Internet
With competition in the telecoms sector for the provision of premium rate services and other telemarketing activities at an all time high, BCH Digital needs to help its customers achieve success with their telephone campaigns. In order to ensure that mission critical customer data is secure and reliable, BCH Digital called upon Zen Internet to guarantee against any network downtime.
BCH Digital Ltd, based in Manchester, specialises in providing Premium Rate Services, Telemarketing Numbers and Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) based Call Handling Solutions, which route calls to the right place at the right time. The services are fully managed on BCH's IVR network, which consists of over 3000 lines and the automated services can cope easily with high call levels. BCH Digital has managed services for Nescafé, Chelsea FC, Max Spielman, GP Banking, Unilever and GMTV to name a few and, in 2004, BCH managed IVR campaigns that generated over 52 million minutes.
Resilience and reliability
Equipment and infrastructure resilience is a key factor in maintaining the quality of service that has come to be expected of BCH Digital. It became apparent that the server set-up hosted in its own offices was not ideal to achieve this. Whenever the connection failed, the servers went offline, affecting the provision of solutions to customers. Hosting the servers at BCH's offices also meant that the company was vulnerable to theft or malicious damage and, if a fire was to break out at the office, this could have resulted in major loss of business or even closure.
Following a personal recommendation from one of its business partners, BCH Digital chose Rochdale-based Zen Internet to provide a co-location solution based at Zen's suite at TeleCity in Manchester. The suite is a secure co-location facility with security prevention solutions such as CCTV, 24/7 manned security, fire and flood prevention systems and UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), backed up with an automatic generator.
Rob Booth, sales director at BCH Digital, explained:
Any outage of longer than a few minutes would start to cause serious problems for our clients. The life-blood of any premium rate service is accurate, reliable and up to date management information and call statistics. Any downtime, which would make such information unavailable, could have major implications for the success of a campaign, as clients would not be able to view their statistics, make routing changes or manage their campaign. We needed a centralised solution for all of our Internet applications, including our Web sites – promotional and extranets - and e-mail to reduce the server administration. Running two offices at either end of the country, alongside the seven different platforms, situated at three different sites – Manchester, Watford and Heathrow – meant the administration was significant. Additionally, we were looking for a new hosting site for our SMS platform, as well as offsite backup.
Security with co-location
BCH purchased half a rack (23.5 U) and 2Mbps Internet connection from Zen to host its Web site and mission-critical data, including customer data. Zen was able to offer BCH a guaranteed 100% uptime connection to the network and the Internet, which meant that there was no threat to the provision of service to customers. Although the servers are now hosted remotely, it is at a local installation, which means authorised employees have easy access to the servers if necessary.
Said Booth:
We now have much less equipment in the office. With everything now in one place it will be much easier to maintain and administer, and any issues can be dealt with quickly and easily. Hosting the servers remotely with Zen is also much more cost effective than kitting out a room within the office with the necessary environmental systems and safeguards.
Zen has helped us achieve our goals of resilience and security by providing us with a highly efficient co-location facility. We have been delighted with their performance, particularly in their customer-focused approach and their helpful and responsive account management, which ensures that technical, operational or administrative queries are resolved quickly and that improvements to the service are implemented on an ongoing basis.
BCH Digital is looking to increase its allocation of space in the near future as the business expands and more customers look to improve efficiency and reliability with a fully managed telecommunications solution.
Continued reliability and resilience of our highly scaleable co-location facility is going to be imperative for BCH to maintain the very high standards that have become our hallmark, and continue to grow and be successful. We believe we are now nicely positioned to be able to do that with Zen.
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