Immediately following a disaster, concerned family and friends will start looking for information. If your organisation is at the centre of the crisis, they will call you. Are your staff and telephone systems prepared to handle the surge of incoming inquiries? Even if you can handle the incoming call volume, what will you do with all the information generated by the influx of calls?

Now take it a step further. Fairly quickly, you need to start calling people back and making notifications - confirming that a loved one was involved in the crisis. You need to start coordinating travel to bring those family members to a central location. Most importantly, you need a way to centralise all the data coming in through the callers, the local and national authorities, and your own internal data such as a manifest.

Kenyon’s International Call Centre Service provides a solution for all of these areas. Here’s what you gain by using our Call Centre:

• Working from a state-of-the-art, fixed location in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, our crisis-trained agents are ready to start accepting calls within 30 minutes of notification to Kenyon.
• When you let us know you need to activate the Call Centre, we’ll provide you with a toll-free number or numbers based on the location(s) of the incident.
• All agents speak fluent English and Spanish, and have access to translators through our partners at Language Line, a professional translation service, for almost any other required language.
• Flexible Call Centre Teams can ramp up or scale down as needed based on call volume, with the ability to receive up to 30,000 calls in a 24-hour period.

Our Call Centre performs four major functions:

• Receive inbound calls on your behalf.
• Make outbound notification calls with appropriate sympathy and skill.
• Make travel reservations.
• Manage the data from the call centre and combine it with all other sources of data, facilitating the smoother delivery of Disaster Response Services and Disaster Humanitarian Services throughout the response.

The backbone of our Call Centre is Kenyon Response®, our proprietary disaster response database. All agents in the call centre have access to Kenyon Response, and when you retain our service, you also have read-only access. This means you see what we see in real time. Data from other sources - such as hospital intake forms, information collected by law enforcement, and information collected in the family assistance centre can easily be imported into our system where our data managers will work to find critical links.

Based on extensive disaster experience, Kenyon has incorporated carefully pre-written scripts into Kenyon Response®, ensuring that agents collect consistent information from all callers.

In essence, the Kenyon International Call Centre allows your team to focus on keeping your business running while we handle not only the surge of inquiries, but also three other critical areas of disaster response: notifications, travel reservations, and most importantly, data management.