Community-based teams play an increasingly critical role in the delivery of services to the public.  Whether neighbourhood policing, mental health care or end of life care; many communication challenges that impact upon the quality of service provided are common.

Patients may need access to their mental health worker or community midwife at any time of the day.  Yet often, due to the limitations of the telephony routing service vulnerable people often cannot reach the individual best placed to handle their call, even when they are on duty.  Instead, callers seeking help invariably reach a switchboard or centralised on-call member of staff.

Your colleagues and partners may experience equal frustration when trying to contact you.

BT SmartNumbers

BT SmartNumbers is a suite of services designed to improve communications making sure that staff will always receive your calls wherever you are. This will:

• Improve your, or your teams, availability. For others trying to reach you, you need to improve your ability to manage your calls more effectively, especially if you spend time away from your desk.
• Ensure you never need miss a call.  When busy, off-duty, on holiday you can simply redirect your calls to colleagues, team members or a nominated delegate – you can provide these people with caller information to inform them call who the call was originally made to and who is calling before the call is answered.
• Provide essential reporting and alerting information. Such as who has called you or your team, when, who left a voicemail, who called you but was re-directed to your delegate, who called you but abandoned the call.
• Prioritise your calls. So that when in meetings or with patients only certain defined individuals can reach you directly.  Others will be handled by your delegate, or be routed to voicemail.
• Increase your personal security and privacy. By giving patients or vulnerable groups a number to call that is not your personal mobile number but a virtual number.

BT Voice Continuity

BT Voice Continuity Directed Recovery is designed to protect and maintain individual DDI voice services.

Unlike other Business Continuity services, Directed Recovery delivers voice calls and faxes to alternative numbers, DDI by DDI, without the need for dedicated hardware or software to be installed on site or in the local telephone exchange. Diverted calls may be distributed across any type of network to any dialable number. These include dedicated DR sites or possibly reciprocal arrangements with partner agencies, satellite offices, homes numbers or staff mobiles.

Whether you are driven by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the Code of Practice for Business Continuity Management BS25999, duty of care requirements for staff in the event of business disruption, or in response to the 2007 Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act that came into force in April 2008, BT Voice Continuity can help.

Find out more by watching the 5 minute demonstration on BT Voice Continuity Directed Recovery.