Northern
Communications

Reaching People When It Counts Most

SUDBURY • NORTH BAY • TIMMINS

November 2003, Issue 18

Northern Communications comes through the
Power Outage with Flying Colors!

Years of experience and countless power interruptions had prepared us for it but never had we, along with 50,000,000 other people, experienced such a long outage as on August 14th & 15th, 2003. Much of our business is emergency services related and therefore we have to be prepared for any eventuality.

911 Call Taking, Fire Department Dispatch, Alarm Service & Monitoring and our Answering Service are all services that must continue to operate regardless of the situation. Lives depend on it!

Thousands of dollars have been invested in preparations for such an event. Contingency plans are in place and secondary contingency plans are available should the original plan fail for some unforeseen reason. All the planning paid off. We would much sooner not have had to use these plans but we sure were glad they were there when we needed them. The combination of foresight and unparalleled commitment from the staff allowed us to keep all crucial services up and running. The Northern Communications paging mainframe continued to function throughout but the individual towers that are spread out across the areas did run out of battery power approximately 5 hours into the outage.

The monitoring station saw a 4,292% increase in the number of signals received that required operator involvement. The call volume in the answering service increased about ten fold causing long hold times but those who exercised patience did get through. Staff made themselves available to work extra hours even though they knew the work was going to be much more demanding than normal. When the end of their shifts came they didn’t budge because they knew that their company, co-workers and community needed them. Temperatures soared and sweat poured but everybody stuck it out. Everybody went far above and beyond the call of duty.

Our clients also deserve a lot of credit for understanding the situation that we were in and for being patient. We should all be proud of the way our company and our community handled this unfortunate incident.

One call-at-a-time, what’s that?

Have you noticed that when you call your Message Center that your call is normally handled without interruption or without having to put you on hold to take another ringing line. That is because we are now on a one-call environment.

We rotate the calls to the next available operator and when the call is answered it is completed before going to another call. We do however have emergency lines, which are presented and may be answered while you are on the line but these are minimal. Hopefully you enjoy this level of service as we strive to continue improving call handling to provide the best customer service possible.

Increased pager coverage for Sudbury area Clients!
Northern Communications has recently erected new towers in Killarney, Little Current and Gore Bay. These new towers have drastically improved our paging system on Manitoulin Island and have allowed us to service clients in the Killarney area. Although it is yet to be tested, we anticipate that these upgrades will also allow us to provide service along the North Shore (Hwy 17 West). Of course, wide area pagers are still available for those who need provincial and national coverage.

Put your mind at ease by ensuring you have received your Messages.
We can now e-mail or fax a record of all calls taken to our answering service clients. This may be a big help to those who wish to verify that they have received all their messages and that they have been acted upon. E-mails and faxes can be sent on a daily, weekly or monthly basis at a cost of $15.00/month. Some clients may wish to subscribe to this service because they are sometimes out of range and miss the odd call. Others may want to use it to ensure that their on-call person has addressed all after hours calls and that the billing has not been missed. Whatever the reason, we are sure that this value added service will be a hit with many message centre clients.

Kids Vote Canada Use Northern Communications for Province Wide Project
In the recent provincial election there was a parallel election held with high school and elementary school children across the entire province voting. Each school held their own vote with the actual candidates from their riding and then tabulated the results for their own school. Hundreds of thousands of votes were tabulated. They then called (877) K-Voting and Northern Communications took all the inbound calls and recorded the results. We were contracted to provide security to the process and to offer the human touch. Once all the calls were in, the results were compiled and sent off to CBC and various other media who were following the story. The day went well and the project was a gleaming success.

Here are the actual results of the Election

Party                                      # of Seats     Popular Vote Percent

Liberal                                         93                     44.981%
Progressive Conservative            0                      17.643%
New Democratic                          9                      21.946%
Green                                            1                     10.936%
Others                                           0                      4.494%

Total                        103         100.00%

 

Employee Check-In Service

Some work environments demand an employee check-in system to ensure the safety of workers. Employees who work in a secluded and or potentially dangerous environment must be checked on every once in a while to be sure that a tragedy has not befallen them. In some instances laws and union contracts require that employers have a system to ensure that their employees are safe. Examples of work settings that may require an employee check-in service are industrial jobs where employees work in a secluded area, social workers who make house visits, electrical linesmen…. Northern Communications now offers an economical automated system that allows workers to call in to confirm that they are OK. You tell us when we should be receiving calls. If no check-in call is received our system automatically transfers the details of the situation to one of our live operators who handles the situation according to your specific requirements. This may mean calling the employee to see if they forgot to call in and if no response is received notifying a superior. If you are concerned about the safety of your employees and want to know more about this system, please call us at 673-6888. Likewise, if you already have an employee check-in system but would like to compare your current costs to the cost of using our automated system, give us a call.

 

Quote of the Month

Learn to share, it is a way of doubling the good and halving the bad.

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