West Northampton Council

Northampton Borough Council provides Callcare, a community alarm service, to protect vulnerable members of the community. In emergency situations, Callcare customers initiate an alarm that connects them to a call answering centre, which provides a critical lifeline 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

When Northampton Borough Council had to relocate the Callcare service it was imperative that disruption to the service was kept to an absolute minimum.

Relocating the Callcare alarm system’s IT and telephony was the responsibility of LGSS, one of the UK’s largest public sector shared service ventures. But they deemed the physical relocation of the main telephone numbers that the Care alarms dial into too risky. They needed a solution to seamlessly divert calls at a specific date and time when the new office become active.

Before the relocation of the Callcare team, the number was ported from the local exchange into the Smartnumbers cloud, enabling the redirection of incoming calls throughout the move.
During and after the move, with the Smartnumbers service in place both the LGSS and Northampton Borough Council staff now have the control necessary to manually divert calls to any location if and when circumstances require. This ensures the total resilience of the service through situations like system upgrades and system maintenance, or if the Callcare premises cannot be reached for any reason.

This major LGSS ICT project proved an all-round success with Northampton Borough Council. The Callcare customers did not encounter any disruption of the service they rely on and the impact of the move on Callcare staff was minimal.
Alan Kench, Telecoms Officer at Northampton Borough Council, says: “Northampton Borough Council and LGSS staff now have increased confidence in a much more resilient service that is ultimately a more effective and reliable solution for our customers.”