Classic Collection is back on track this week after a lightning storm in Worthing left its building without phone lines.
Nick Munday, owner and managing director, said lines went down at around 8pm on Thursday and didn’t come back on until around 2.30pm the following day.
Staff were on a company night out at the time but thought nothing of the storm.
Munday said he was alerted later that night that staff in the call centre, which is open until 10pm, were unable to make or receive calls and that homeworkers were unable to work also.
The next day six members of staff – including Munday – transferred over to a nearby disaster recovery call centre where they were able to field calls and then pass queries back to the main office where staff used their mobiles to respond to agents.
Despite phone lines being down, the company made £100,000 worth of bookings during that period and by the end of play on Friday had made £260,000 which is the average daily taking for Classic.
“Hopefully agents didn’t notice any difference in our service,” he said. “I was very happy and by the end of Friday I found it very uplifting because my staff really pulled together to make sure that the issue didn’t become a big crisis.
“I’ve been in the industry for 33 years and it really made me feel uplifted.
“We didn’t lose anything through the phone lines being down because we were able to find out exactly who had tried to call us during the outage and we then called them all back.”