Tomorrow morning's telephone system maintenance

[#1]

Quote

Subject: Planned Support Centre telephone system maintenance - Thursday 10th September 1.00am-4.00am When's this work happening? Early tomorrow morning. What does it affect? Inbound telephone calls to our Support Centre How long will it take? About half an hour. What does the work involve? We need to swap out some damaged fibre that has been causing intermittent voice quality issues for customers calling our Support Centre. Is it likely to cause problems? Yes, there is likely to be a period of up to an hour during which attempts to contact the Support Centre will be greeted with an engaged tone. Is there anything else I need to know? We suggest that you raise any non-urgent support queries using the Help Assistant available on our website.

What's the point of having a second call centre in South Africa is you can't divert all calls to it when there's planned maintenance? Does this mean that if there is an unexpected problem affecting Sheffield calls cannot be taken by SA either?

[#2]

It's worth bearing in mind that we're talking about a time when we expect extremely few calls.
I'll try and get some specifics from Bob, but I suspect the maintenance is being done at the Telewest end to improve the quality of the calls across both platforms, hence the downtime.

[#3]

Failing calls over to South Africa has not been possible due to the nature of this work jelv. Calls to the Madasafish numbers will continue to route through to South Africa during the maintenance window however anything pointed at the Plusnet IVR will be greeted with an engaged tone. I don't think it's outside of the realms of possibility to fail calls over in this scenario but we've not yet completed the work that would allow us to do this.
There have been plenty of unexpected problems since we've had South Africa on board and we've successfully failed calls across to them on many an occasion in the past.