Seamless Voice Continuity for employee assistance organisation ICAS

London, England. January 2007

ICAS, one of the world's leading providers of employee support and behavioural risk management services, has signed up to the unique SmartNumbers Voice Continuity service as part of its Virtual Contact Centre solution.

ICAS is constantly looking to improve its services to clients - and making better use of technology is a very important part of that according to Dawn Mellor.

"As a hosted voice service, SmartNumbers plays a key role in our disaster recovery planning" she explains. "In the unlikely event that we lost telephony services at both our Glasgow and Milton Keynes offices, the SmartNumbers service will ensure that callers can still be routed through to home-based counsellors, ensuring business continuity at all times."

As an organisation responsible for providing post trauma employee counselling on events such as terrorist attacks, deaths of employees and assaults on staff, ICAS follows rigorous quality standards. It makes every effort to ensure that 'time to answer' is minimised and 'call quality' is always maintained.

According to Dawn Mellor, Manager of the ICAS Telephone Counselling Centre, the use of the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre has improved overall quality. "It's enabled us to be much more flexible in the way we work with our home-based counsellors" she explains. "Not only can we run on a 24/7 basis but we can also recruit specialists who can't get into our offices to work - either because of their other work commitments or because they live too far away."

"The SmartNumbers service is reliable and easy-to-use" said ICAS' Dawn Mellor "and when we do get issues, we have 24/7 technical support. It's very easy to use the SmartNumbers web interface to change peoples' rotas and switch to night service - and detailed stats on call volumes and abandoned calls gives us all the information we need to ensure future performance and quality are optimised."

ICAS, which has used SmartNumbers flexible working technology since 1997, first moved to the SmartNumbers Virtual Contact Centre service in 2004.

About ICAS

ICAS is one of the world's leading providers of employee support and behavioural risk management services. Employee assistance and well being programmes, critical incident and trauma services, expatriate support and training are just a selection of ICAS online and offline services proven to contribute positively to organisational health and performance. With operations in 17 countries spanning six continents, ICAS supports more than 1.5 million employees in over 700 companies worldwide, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. For more information please visit www.icasworld.com or call 0800 068 68 58.