With load shedding becoming a common occurrence in our daily lives in South Africa, most businesses, and even homeowners, are looking for reliable suppliers such as Standby Systems and Riello UPS for a backup power solution.
Our solutions range from small home inverters of 1 kVA, to complex 3-phase parallel and modular UPS plants of up to 6,4 MVA, to keep the lights on and businesses operational during repeated power outages.
Why do we have call centers, and why do they need a backup power system to support them?
Call centres are an important part of our economy in SA and offer a different channel of communication to clients to address service inquiries and provide marketing and market analysis for big businesses. Call centres give you, the customer, the quick option of making a phone call to an agent to report a problem for the quickest direct resolution.
Suppose a call centre does not have a reliable UPS backup system. In that case, many thousands of customers will soon become very irritated with a massive backlog in service delivery and problem resolution during rolling blackouts and mains failures. This will easily damage any large corporation’s image in the marketplace, from banking, insurance, medical aids, and many more. These call centres need to operate 24/7, and the only way they can do this in SA is with a reliable UPS solution for power backup like a Riello UPS from Standby Systems anywhere in Southern Africa.
What backup power UPS systems are available for a call centre?
There are many solutions to backup power for a call centre. By far the most reliable and trustworthy is an online double-conversion UPS plant with a 10 to 30 minute backup time used in conjunction with a standby diesel generator set, or 4 to 8 hours backup battery, for when the power fails.
Essentially the UPS bridges the loss of power in the time between when the power fails, and the generator starts up and takes on the load. Similarly, when mains power returns, the UPS protects the load when there is a loss of power when the generator transfers to mains again.
Without the UPS, the critical loads like a call centre would be off for a few minutes while the generator set starts. Because the computer-based load supporting a call centre is very sensitive and critical, expensive IT equipment failure will occur due to sudden power off and then on. If it were not for the intervention of a backup power supply like a UPS plant.
How does a call centre benefit by having a backup UPS solution behind it?
The debt-ridden ESKOM and its complete inabilities to efficiently run and maintain the power supply grid in SA has resulted in the ever so common power failure and rolling blackouts for more than a decade. Carrying ESKOMs woes have resulted in a contraction of the country’s GDP by 3,2% in 2019 alone.
All businesses, including call centres, need to ensure they keep every customer – that means being available all the time, irrespective of power outages. Generally, even when there are rolling blackouts, there is still telephone and cell phone availability, and people still expect to be able to resolve issues telephonically under such power supply conditions. That is why a call centre needs to have a backup power solution like a UPS unit.
Many call centres handle sensitive and highly important personal data. It is essential that, besides being available to its clients 24/7, the data is stored safely and securely. It is important to protect valuable data from software attacks and hacking through firewalls and security software and to protect the IT hardware that is storing the data from power outages and bad power, which will damage the hardware and render the data inaccessible.
The only way to protect the hardware is to use a reliable online double-conversion UPS system that will block bad power from the mains supply from reaching the hardware and also back up the power supply when the power fails.