In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud communications and contact centres, few companies can boast the level of reliability that Content Guru brings to the table. With a background deeply rooted in telecommunications and a track record of maintaining a “five nines” reliability, their storm® CCaaS platform stands out as a top solution repeatedly chosen by mission-critical sectors, both in the UK and worldwide.
In a recent chat with Martin Taylor, Content Guru’s Co-Founder and Deputy CEO, we delved into the platform’s role in maintaining the high reliability and availability of police forces, healthcare operations, and national power infrastructure.
The Root of Reliability
Storm’s foundations can be traced back to Content Guru‘s origins in the telecommunications sector, long before the platform’s inception.
“We didn’t come from the on-premises world – we actually came from working in the telecom networks, and specifically live TV,” Taylor explains.
“When it comes to live voting for shows like Big Brother or X Factor, the availability of network services is non-negotiable. And so, we’ve always had to operate to something like a five-nines standard.”
In case you’re not familiar with the jargon, ‘five nines’ reliability means guaranteeing uptime to approximately just five and a quarter minutes of downtime per year.
“While running a CCaaS platform is much more complex than counting votes, the principles are the same: dealing with surges effectively and being constantly available,” Taylor notes.
The design ethos of scale and resilience, established in Content Guru’s TV days, remains central to the company’s core. In the past year, they’ve even invested further to create ESP (Emergency Service Platform). ESP is a variation of storm meant for emergency services only and offers 100% availability.
Serving the Police Sector
One of the mission-critical sectors benefiting from storm’s reliability is the police. Content Guru is currently the sole CCaaS provider that has contracts in place with the UK police, who use their platform extensively.
“Just this month, yet another English police force under the 999-emergency service umbrella started using our platform – Surrey Police. The feedback there has been enormously positive, which was a remarkable achievement for us,” Taylor shares.
Another one of Content Guru’s major law enforcement clients is Police Scotland, Scotland’s national police force. Police Scotland are now in the middle of a complete migration into CCaaS, planned to go live early next year.
“This is a huge transformation project for them, as it merges several previously independent police forces in the country, and we’re extremely proud to be their vendor of choice for it,” Taylor notes.
The utilization of storm also extends beyond emergency services to services like 101, handling urgent, non-emergency police calls. The platform empowers these services with clever features like self-service in the queue, caller identification, incident logging, and more.
Empowering Healthcare
Similar to the police, the UK healthcare system has a two-tier setup, divided into Emergency Care and Urgent Care. Both utilize Content Guru’s platform.
“Every 999 ambulance call in the UK passes through storm, and specifically through the ESP part it, to find the first available call handler anywhere in the country among the many regional ambulance services,” Taylor says.
If the London service is extra busy, for example, the platform allows someone in a different region to pick up a London-based call. As all regions are interconnected with the CAD system, a call handler from that region can easily dispatch the relevant local resource – whether an ambulance or a paramedic on a bicycle – to the caller’s location.
“This proves particularly effective during winter, when there’s immense pressure on healthcare services,” Taylor notes.
NHS-provided Urgent Care services, accessed by the 111 number, also rely heavily on the storm platform.
“Prior to the NHS’s Single Virtual Contact Centre (SVCC) program, each regional provider would have their own tech, resulting in a very uneven quality of service,” Taylor explains.
In 2015, all London providers were migrated to the cloud and unified into one contact centre overlay using storm. This proved to be particularly valuable during the 2020 pandemic, where call volumes had surged over 500%. Following the pandemic, the decision had been made to create a London-style service on a national basis.
“It’s already fully implemented in some parts of the country, and other parts are moving along at their own pace.”
Ensuring the Flow of Power
While not defined as emergency services, UK power services represent a different facet of National Critical Infrastructure covered almost entirely by storm.
“We began working with our first UK Distribution Network Operator (DNO) back in 2008,” Taylor shares.
“UK Power Networks (UKPN), the largest of the DNOs, were familiar with our TV work and asked if we could put our platform between the callers and the contact center to do some buffering and queuing in the case of a major blackout. And the rest is history.”
In time, the company expanded its services to deliver power providers a complete end-to-end CCaaS solution. Today, out of six UK DNOs, five use Content Guru’s platform.
“That demonstrated ability to provide per-household granularity service in an emergency-type basis, using a three-digit number, paved the way for the NHS and the police to confide in us.”
What’s Next?
Content Guru and storm are continuously evolving, seeking to bring their expertise to new areas and regions, with the current destination being the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) in the US – a huge milestone for the company.
“We’re aiming to be the first CCaaS platform to qualify as ‘high’ on the FedRAMP,” Taylor shares excitedly.
“Thanks to all the high-reliability services we’ve been working with around the world, constituting a testament to our commitment to mission-critical sectors, we will now be able to make storm available to some of the most critical federal services in the US,” he concludes.
Want to learn more about Content Guru and storm?
Visit their website here.
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