Snowbound IT workers can phone it in

"On snow days, in the old days, our call center staff had to be physically at the location. Now they can connect by phone, from home, remote parts of the state of Pennsylvania -- Carbondale, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg," says Sean McCloat, corporate director of IT Services at NHS Human Services, Lafayette Hill.

NHS is the former Northwest Human Services, a mostly nonprofit agency run by ex-State Sen. Joe Rocks (R-Phila.), who's paid $1 million a year to oversee NHS's 700 residential-based mental health programs and other facilities. The group's tech help desk logs more than 7,500 tech service calls a month from NHS's 10,000 workers  from New York to Louisiana.

Why not shut the call centers and just let everyrone work from home? "We do have the technology and we will look inot that," McCloat told me. But managers, he added, "may be leery of setting a precedent." With infrastructure, programming and services workers laboring to get in on tough driving days, "some people might think it's a little unfair" if phone-based workers get to stay home. When technology improves, there are still the cultural questions.

McCloat credits the improved service to the agency's decision to switch more of its phone and Internet services, including the help desk that supports hundreds of NHS locations, to Comcast Business's cable-based Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) voice-over-Internet. Using NHS's existing phone equiment, Comcast offers three service tiers, depending on the facility and need, for NHS's pharmacies, clinics and other locations.

"The engineers they were able to pull in for us are really first-class people. They've gotten beyond the growing pains they went through a couple of years ago," McCloat told me. "They were very interested in showing what they were capable of. We gave them a leg in the door," since Comcast was already a familiar vendor from its video services. "And they're local." 

Moving to Comcast "probably saved 50% in costs" -- not all from the bottom line: "We believe our service levels have increased 30-40%," while direct cost savings are in the 25-30% range. Plans call for switching NHS's Comcast Business Internet to the company's Ethernet system to boost volume.