London, 27 June 2012: Kcom, the leading managed communication services provider, has completed the world’s first ever implementation of an authorised emergency services contact centre based on Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise (UCCE) technology. The implementation, for Dyfed Powys Police, is the result of Kcom working with Cisco over a three year period, to bring its contact centre solution to the emergency services market.

Dyfed Powys Police serves a population of 490,000 people and received over 35,000 calls in 2011. With the high volume of calls and the demand for swift response times, it’s vital that the contact centre can operate effectively at peak demand.

The new control centre system enables operators to view accurate real-time information, handling sub-second refresh rates which ensure they can manage the large number of calls they receive. This is significantly faster than the average call centre refresh rate of ten to twenty seconds and ensures that 999 calls are routed to skilled operators as quickly as possible.

Additionally, Kcom developed an innovative solution which automatically provides a call handler with the caller’s address and a map reference of their location, giving more detailed, immediate information and creating a quicker transfer of information between the operator and response teams. 

“Dyfed Powys Police serves over half of Wales, meaning we have a high volume of calls and strict SLAs to answer them in time. This means we need a highly resilient and efficient 999 call handling service,” said Mark Hall, Head of Network Services at Dyfed Powys Police. “We’re delighted with the new system which is truly state of the art. We’ve worked with Kcom for a number of years and they always provide market leading consultation and support. The implementation process was fast and seamless due to their knowledge of solutions and their support in providing a Cisco development environment for APD.”

Elizabeth Bramwell, Sales Director at Kcom, commented: “Our experience gained by providing services to over 40 per cent of the UK’s police forces, gives us extensive knowledge of what customers in this space want. We have worked with Dyfed Powys for fifteen years and the force asked us to devise a programme to upgrade its increasingly obsolete ICCS control system. We worked closely with Cisco and APD to install a solution which has incredibly high resilience with no likelihood of lost calls, the first of its kind in the world.”

The contact centre solution combines Cisco’s UCCE solution with APD Communications CORTEX ICCS into a single call routing platform for emergency and non-emergency calls across the control centre systems, and delivers a single management information view of all inbound calls.

Jonathan Hamill, APD’s Sales & Marketing Director, commented, “APD’s CORTEX Integrated Communications Control Solution merges TETRA radio dispatch, call handling, video monitoring and much more into a single user-friendly touchscreen interface.  With police finances under pressure, Dyfed Police will benefit from greater functionality and increased resilience and efficiency – significantly enhancing the service it offers to the public.”

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