8/15/2021 (Revised 5/4/2023)
For many years we had been asking ourselves how Centratel could survive an evacuation of our headquarters building. As it stood, our building in downtown Bend, Oregon could be completely evacuated for any number of reasons, including bomb threats, street-gang civil unrest, fire, and so on. We would not be able to process calls—and within days, we would literally be out of business.
We had started seriously discussing various options in January 2018 when IT and telephony technology had developed enough to make handling calls at “remote” locations a practical consideration. But other matters took precedence and the project was shifted to the back burner. Then, in August 2019 we had a bomb threat two blocks away at the county courthouse and authorities stopped just short of emptying our building. (We were lucky. We fell just outside the radius of evacuation. For several hours everyone between us and the courthouse had to flee their offices for many hours.)
No matter the reason for evacuating, we can’t just turn our operation off because so many of our accounts—all across the United States—depend on us to process their emergency calls. It’s our promise to our clients to always be available. In fact, for the last forty years, Centratel has never been off-line for more than an hour (and that 90 minute outage happened thirty-one years ago).
So, seeing the bomb scare as a “red flag for improvement,” our operations and IT staff instantly re-focused on what it would take to survive a complete office evacuation. We found that it would be possible to have Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs) process calls from another ad-hoc central location and/or from their homes, but not without some seriously high-level IT infrastructure, telephony, and other esoteric protocol/hardware modifications. We needed to develop proprietary software and engineer some innovative, groundbreaking IoT (“Internet of Things”) devices.
The initiative had to comply with strict HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requirements that demanded high standards in terms of end-to-end cryptography and ePHI (Electronic Protected Health Information) data protection strategies.
So, based on our Strategic Objective and Operating Principles, it was a no-brainer to move ahead, and in September 2019 we revamped our priorities and actually started the engineering process. We wholly relied on our IT engineers Marcello and Manu, based in Italy and Romania, and our Bend, Oregon-based senior IT engineer, Jason.
Andi, our Bend-based COO, coordinated the project, while Kendra managed our TSR staff.
We had targeted June 1, 2020, to complete the testing, at which point we would be able to instantly “flip a switch” so the entire company could seamlessly function from anywhere outside our HQ building.
All was proceeding well enough, but then the unexpected national COVID-19 lockdown began in the first week of March 2020, about the time we were scheduled to start testing. Andi took assertive action, convincing me that we must finish the project NOW! She said that within a few weeks there was a good chance we would no longer be able to process calls from inside our office, and so we dropped all other long- and short-term engineering system-improvement projects so we could focus exclusively on “going virtual.” A shut-down scenario would literally end Centratel as a business when our clients rushed to other still-operational answering services to process their emergency calls.
To add to the challenge during this crunch time, our Italian team was COVID-quarantined within their homes and apartments for fourteen straight weeks. And I mean quarantined. They could not leave their homes/offices without special written government permission. If they ventured outside without paperwork and were caught, they would be jailed.
For Centratel, being able to operate without a central call center facility was the mother of all challenges. For 36 years we had been processing all of our incoming calls, 24/7/365, out of a single Bend, Oregon, headquarters building.
Another hurdle was to make this a smooth transition for our TSRs who now would work from home offices, ensuring each had high-speed internet, the proper computer equipment, and a quiet, private place to process alls. We accelerated the testing, purchased more backup equipment, and retrained our TSRs.
We had to make it happen fast. We pushed hard and by the end of March, 2020 our TSRs were operating from their home offices, just in time for the Oregon COVID-19 lockdown.
Thank you, Andi, Marcello, Manu, Jason, Kendra and team!
Sam Carpenter, President and majority owner
