Fighting the pandemic with state-ofthe- art Contact Center technology

More than a year has passed since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic and the virus is still spreading. Our daily lives continue to be dominated by incidence figures and other indicators. But the fight against the virus is on. In addition to the vaccination campaign, a comprehensive catalog of measures is being deployed to make the pandemic manageable and decisively reduce the number of new infections.

The Bavarian capital of Munich is relying on so-called contact tracing teams to locate and inform the contacts of infected persons and thus contain the further outbreak of the virus. Contact tracing is intended to break infection chains as quickly as possible. For this, a reliable technical platform and smooth communication processes are among the basic requirements.

Due to the situation, the contact tracing teams in Munich had been set up in separate locations. By combining them at a central location and equipping them uniformly with modern technology, contact tracing was to become even more efficient. In view of the urgent crisis situation, quick action was required.

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When the responsible officials of the City of Munich first spoke with IP Dynamics about the project on November 13, 2020, the requirements were already clearly outlined. A tracking center for 500 employees was to be built on the city‘s trade fair grounds. The scheduled launch? About two and a half weeks later, on December 1!

After defining the framework conditions, the City of Munich placed the order on November 19. Accordingly, IP Dynamics was to immediately set up a Contact Center with several hotlines, DTMF query and waiting field for up to 500 agents or contact followers. The Voxtron Communication Center (VCC) from Enghouse Interactive should be the foundation of the solution. This Contact Center is already successfully in operation at the City of Munich for the entire service hotlines.

The tracking center was to be built in Hall C2 of Messestadt Riem. At the start of the project, however, there was still nothing but empty space in this hall. In order to ensure the smooth functionality of the tracking center, the City of Munich decided not to use an existing infrastructure, but to set up the entire center from scratch, both organizationally and technically. IP Dynamics was responsible for the deployment and configuration of the Contact Center software with the entire necessary server landscape.

To save valuable hours given the tight schedule, the IP Dynamics team set up and installed the SQL, Contact Center and IVR servers immediately after delivery at the company‘s headquarters in Hamburg. Meanwhile, colleaguesfrom Munich and Stuttgart performed the basic installation of the Voxtron Communication Center remotely during a weekend shift, checking the system thoroughly. On November 23, the servers were transferred from Hamburg to Munich and implemented there the following day. Again one day later, the IT department of the City of Munich established the network connection between the new servers and the exhibition hall in Riem.

“Throughout the entire project, we worked hand in hand with our colleagues from the IT department of the City of Munich,” recalls Alexander Birkholz, responsible for technical implementation at IP Dynamics. “Because the individual work steps had to be precisely coordinated, we needed accurate teamwork. Coordination, planning and implementation merged seamlessly.”

In this way, all people involved have mastered many technical challenges. For example, it was decided at short notice to work with VCC web clients instead of the usual fat clients at the agents‘ workstations due to security and data protection considerations. IP Dynamics provided the additional server capacity required for this on time. And even setting up a load balancer at short notice to distribute the user load evenly across the servers was not a problem. On the last three days before the go-live, Alexander Birkholz and the IP Dynamics team made the system fail-safe (redundancy). In addition, the call flows were implemented in the VCC and final adjustments were made.

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Thanks to the excellent teamwork, the tracking center was able to go into operation on schedule on December 1 after a final function test. It was opened on site by the Munich mayor Dieter Reiter. IP Dynamics has led its tasks in the project to success under high pressure and with great engagement.

Today, up to 500 contact tracers are fighting Covid in 24/7 mode in Hall C2 at Messestadt Riem. The employees, including service staff from various departments of the City of Munich, the Bundeswehr, the police and the Freistaat, work in small, isolated offices. If needed, the center could be quickly expanded. Contact tracers use the VCC‘s web client and make phone calls via headset. Thanks to the Contact Center software, called persons can call back the crisis center after a missed call. Via IVR query and DTMF menu, callers can specify their request. If all staff are on the call, callers are held in the waiting queue before being transferred to an appropriate staff member via Contact Center routing. This was not always possible before the centralization of the contact tracing teams and increases the chance that the important information is transmitted quickly.

The new tracking center, together with the modern IT equipment, enables more effective workflows and faster coordination. In this way, IT plays an important role in the fight against the pandemic.