City of Charles Sturt gains insight into communications with UC

The City of Charles Sturt has implemented a unified communications solution across several of its locations, improving staff efficiency and customer service delivery.

The city is a local government area situated to the west of the central business district of Adelaide, South Australia. The council services a population of approximately 105,000 residents.

Janelle Sollitto, Acting Manager Information Services for City of Charles Sturt, said: “In 2010, we decided it was time to improve our ability to communicate between our various offices and streamline customer service delivery.”

After undertaking a tender process evaluating solutions from multiple vendors, the city selected a unified communications solution from Mitel. The solution comprises Mitel’s Communications Director (MCD), Contact Center Enterprise, Intelligent Queue and Live Business Gateway.

Council services are delivered by a team of 450 employees, with the majority of employees located at large facilities at the Civic and Beverley Centres. The central library and most customer services are based at the Civic Centre. Field service employees handling maintenance of property, parks, roads and sporting facilities are based at the Beverley Centre.

In addition, the council operates a further four library branches and five small community centres.

All locations are connected via a private IP wide area network. The primary MCD is located in the Civic Centre, with a second in the Beverley Centre. The entire solution is configured to provide a service across all locations, with the ability for automatic failover in the event of a fault or communications disruption.

Mitel 5360 IP Phones were deployed for each desk, incorporating colour touch screens and support for gigabit speed networking. Each phone offers access to communications features, custom web content and interactive applications.

“The Civic Centre is the key contact point for many of our interactions with residents, with some of our team members serving people across both the front desk and via phone enquiries. These staff members can now see on their computer screens how many customers are waiting to be served, and which colleagues are available to help, which makes it much easier for them to balance their workload,” said Sollitto.

The system “has allowed us to improve the flexibility of our contact centre, making it possible for us to easily tailor announcements, automatically redirect calls, and present customers with interactive options”, she continued.

An organisation-wide single employee directory for phone communications has been implemented, which simplifies administration of employee moves and changes. The IT help desk team can make routine changes to configurations and call handling settings, and have integrated the solution with the Microsoft application environment used by council. The solution also allows automatically scheduled web-based reports to be produced, providing further visibility into customer service delivery.

“We have integrated Microsoft Office Communications Server, which allows staff to see presence information for their colleagues, enabling them to quickly direct calls to available colleagues, without dialling multiple extensions,” Sollitto said.

The system “has helped us to improve the efficiency and customer service delivery of our front desk and contact centre teams, without increasing our budgeted costs”, she said.