Fire drill or other emergency issues on call centres

Question

Hello, we've had several fire drills recently in our new building where we've had to evacuate all personell which left the phone lines open and un-staffed, so all calls coming in would either be sent to agents (if they didn't remember to log off their CAD programs before leaving) or be played some sort of High Call Volume prompt, depending on the script.
What we're looking to have is some sort of file or even steps that a manager/supervisor can quickly do to re-route all their lines to play a specific pre-recorded prompt so that callers calling in during this fire drill can hear an appropriate emergency message and be asked to call back later, or leave a message for example.
We've seen examples where we can set up an XML file similar to the Holiday.xml file that stores holiday dates and the manager/supervisor can quickly add a date to that XML file and the scripts that make reference to it will automatically play an emergency prompt. But, are there any other simpler methods to get this accomplished?
In order to have this XML file work, we have to give admin access to the IPCC server to the various managers and supervisors, and don't want to do this since this would give them access to the entire IPCC system, and they can accidentally move files around and cause issues.
Any suggestions out there?
Thanks,
Joe

Answer 1

Hi Joe -
There really shouldn't be a need to have that level of staff actually modifying the XML files. For static dates like Holidays or even short-notice (1 week or so) additions, the system admin should take the requests and make the XML file changes.
For dynamic changes, like the emergency evacuation (fire drill, bomb threat, etc.), the method needs to be "quick and easy". I usually recommend the allocation of a DID number (so that the process can take place via mobile phone while the supervisor is evacuating the building if needed) which triggers an Application in IPCC. The application can be protected with a configured PIN number or even use the built-in LDAP validation to allow certain users access. This application would itself modify the XML file to indicate an emergency, and the normal routing scripts would check against these before ever sending a call to queue.
What you have are 2 XML files, one which is the active file and the other which is the template.
The active file might look like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
disabled
And the template like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
%status%
So then the Application (after the caller verifies themselves) offers a menu of "emable" or "disable". Based on the selection, you pull up the template XML and perform a Keyword Translation (or Text Substitution for Keywords, depending on version) of keyword "status" with either "disable" or "enable" text.
Your routing scripts will simply perform a Create File Document, Create XML Document, Get XML Document Data with XPath of "/descendant::Emergency/child::Status" and take action based on the value returned.
- Bill