Ku-ring-gai Council

Client

Ku-ring-gai Council (KRGC), situated on the North Shore of Sydney city, provides a range of services and facilities to the local community to ensure comfortable living. KRGC employs around 500 staff to carry out a variety of roles across Council business: urban planners, accountants, librarians, gardeners, youth workers engineers and plumbers.

Opportunity

KRGC had utilised an aged IP PABX for many years, which due to the age of the hardware and looming end-of-support dates posed significant risk to their business. The risk of system failure, coupled with the requirement to add functionalities and move services onto a platform fit for the future, caused KRGC to look to market for a Unified Communications solution.

The Council aimed to provide a higher level of customer service by implementing a contact centre to assist with queries from citizens, and improve the way in which information and queries were processed. Each aspect of the customer facing operations needed to be reviewed; from how rangers assess and report infrastructure issues, to utilising web-facing contact assets and assisting staff to collaborate more easily.

Solution

After an intensive selection process focusing around capability, value for money and maturity, the Cisco Unified Communications solution was decided upon. Outcomex, named Uplinx Group at the time of the project, was the integrator responsible for delivering the solution. Key requirements were met by deploying:

• Cisco Voice Appliances (BE6000) across two sites, for redundancy and resiliency;
• Cisco Jabber, Webex, Communications Manager services, for invasive service delivery of various voice and video capabilities to all staff;
• Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express, for ingestion of customer queries via phone, email and web.

The Cisco services were integrated with the Microsoft application stack, which allowed seamless delivery of information across the desktop platforms. Integration of Jabber into Council tablet and mobile phone platforms allows extended presence with voice and video services available with internet connection.

Web-based Contact Centre services allow customer service agents to work onsite and offsite seamlessly, and to choose between soft-phones, traditional handsets or both.

This deployment allows KRGC to react more quickly to incidents within the municipality by changing notification messages across phone queues on the fly. This new system allows rangers to communicate via video with their facilities bases and to have team-based instant messaging during remediation work. The next phase of deployment will allow citizens to seek advice via live web-chat back into the Contact Centre, video calls into KRGC or kiosks located in public spaces.

Given the manner in which the Cisco solution is deployed, any amalgamation activity is made simpler, given the ability to integrate and federate the Cisco solution with other phone systems, or merely deploy a handset to new users joining KRGC. By utilising the Contact Centre, consolidating citizen queries from a number of municipalities into a single contact metric is a simple and efficient solution.

Impact

KRGC now has a resilient, reliable and supportable communications platform. What started as a risk mitigation exercise has delivered a suite of elevated services which are delivering a more efficient and customer focused environment. Further KRGC is able to better respond to the needs of its ratepayers and ultimately service them better.