KINGS LYNN BOROUGH COUNCIL
Central Telecom has implemented a leading edge, converged solution for the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk, which provides citizen services in a large predominantly rural area. Over the next 20 years they, along with the West Norfolk Partnership, are moving towards a shared vision for King’ Lynn to become the economic ‘driver’ for West Norfolk.
The Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk needed to develop a new Council Information Centre and deploy a cost effective solution across the enterprise which would allow a slow migration from their existing digital INDeX system to a full IP solution, without disrupting their daily operations.
BACKGROUND
One of the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk’s key ICT strategies was moving the organisation to VoIP, their key requirement was the development of a new contact centre using VoIP technology which would eventually be rolled out across the whole of the council.
Central’s brief was to provide a resilient, reliable and high quality solution that would enhance communications between sites and remote and home workers. To achieve this Central seamlessly integrated a Mitel Call Centre solution with the existing INDeX at their main headquarters in Kings Court, in addition to this a number of small Mitel gateways were installed in remote locations which allowed the Council to route internal calls across the entire network.
Also, cultural changes meant that the council needed to provide staff with the ability to work from home. To enable this they undertook a pilot project in the Revenues Department providing all homeworkers with a Mitel Teleworker Solution that supports remote agents with complete access to the same voice and data functionality enjoyed by office based staff.
PROPOSED SOLUTION
The Council’s HO at Kings Court had an INDeX supporting 400 people, Central proposed the Mitel Call Centre solution as a gateway to enable a slow migration of users from digital to IP phone and enable remote workers at their new Council Information Centre in Priory House.
In addition to this they proposed smaller Mitel gateways in other remote locations such as the Oasis Leisure Centre, Downham and Hunstanton which would be connected over IP to enable internal calls to be passed throughout the entire network.
As their new Council Information Centre was temporarily located 200 metres away while refurbishments were made to Kings Court they needed a short term and cost effective solution to route the calls through the new IP solution. An infra red link was installed with resilient radio links allowing them to run all centre agents on IP across an infra red link which proved a more cost effective than the cost of a fixed line connection.
As part of their programme of organisational and cultural change, the Council also wanted to introduce Call Management and a flexible working solution across the enterprise.
IMPLEMENTATION
The first phase of IP implementation was designed to incorporate the Council Information Centre along with other key areas of citizen service including Revenues, Planning, Environment and Health and Housing. The Council chose a Mitel Contact Centre Management Solution as it not only provided the most cost effective solution but also offered a comprehensive browser-based application set for real-time monitoring, historical reporting and forecasting across all contact centre media including voice, email, web chat and fax.
It also provided the Council with real-time monitoring for tracking agent and queue statistics from the single agent level to centre-wide activities and its advanced reporting capabilities enable managers to review, analyse and forecast contact centre performance.
Andrew Howell, Senior Technical Services Analyst at the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk said ‘The Mitel 6110 Call centre solution was the most viable solution and cost effective solution for the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk. Now, instead of speaking to individual departments, citizens can now go to one advisor who is able to handle all queries. This has meant a reduction in waiting time with all calls answered at the source instead of being directed through a series of call options. We have been able to ensure that citizens’ queries will be dealt immediately and won’t be passed through a series of departments or directed to voicemail.’
Within the remote locations Central installed the Mitel 3300 CXi which provides a low cost way to deploy an entire portfolio of IP Telephony applications, including Teleworking, Unified Messaging, Presence and Video-conferencing.
Mitel CX IP Dect phones are now used at the Oasis Sports and Leisure Centre, Hunstanton for mobile and roaming staff so they can continue to work on the move and be contacted at all times.
As part of their organisational changes to enable homeworking and drive efficiency, the Council have been running a Teleworker pilot project within their Revenues Department. Following a successful trial of the Your Assistant and Your Assistant Softphone the Council will now be rolling this out throughout the enterprise as a tool to increase staff retention, reduce real estate costs and provide a good life work balance. The product is a fully manageable, dockable, customisable set of windows that eliminate telephony and data collaboration complexity while improving your communication capability, all from your own desktop.
Proteus Call Management system has been installed across the enterprise with a server at Kings Court and remote buffers on smaller Mitels. Proteus is an easy-to use communication management solution that captures and records data on incoming, outgoing and internal communications directly from the switch delivering a new generation of integrated communications solutions for businesses by offering landline phone, mobile, Internet and e-mail analysis in real time. Proteus automatically interprets this data and presents the information in professional management reports.
Customers use Proteus to allocate costs throughout the company, increase network efficiency, verify bills, monitor call traffic and employee activity and respond to calls made to emergency services (E911 or 999).
THE FUTURE
A Mitel controller is to be installed at Hunstanton CIC to IP enable the office and gain benefits of free calls between sites. They are also currently considering ways to do this by putting another controller in place with resilient licensing and external messaging platform to provide messaging for all Mitel and INDeX users but also to provide instructions to remote staff in event of a disaster, a dial up platform is necessary to collect messages.
Plans are also being formulated to install Mitel controllers at the King’s Lynn Corn Exchange and Princess Theatre in Hunstanton. This will allow the Arts and Entertainment Division to implement an integrated telephone box office to serve three Arts venues across the Borough.
These projects will take the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk a step closer to their vision of a totally integrated VoIP network for all Council offices and venues.
The Mitel® 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) provides enterprises with a highly scalable, feature-rich communications system designed to support businesses from 10-65,000 users. The 3300 ICP provides enterprise IP-PBX capability plus a range of embedded applications including standard unified messaging, auto-attendant, ACD and wireless. Operating across virtually any LAN/WAN infrastructure, the 3300 ICP provides seamless IP networking allowing for full feature transparency within distributed environments by supporting networking standards such as Q.SIG, DPNSS, and MSDN. The 3300 ICP provides organizations with the opportunity to IP enable their legacy PBX's, protecting existing investments while delivering all the advantages of a converged infrastructure.
The Disaster Recovery site which is currently under development will allow use of mailboxes should a disaster happen. A Mailbox can be set for all department heads so messages can be left and retrieved. Each department will also be able to dial in and listen to bespoke messages which can be updated from anywhere. This is a big gain for the council as it gives the opportunity to have a more resilient solution.
Said Andrew ‘Central has met our expectations, delivering added value through ongoing project management, implementation, service and support. The solution is scalable and flexible meeting our needs now and in the future.
I wanted my technical team to work alongside Central’s engineers as partners to ensure in-house understanding of the solution – I did not want a company that would install a system and just walk away. We had no in-house VoIP skills so it was important to work with a company who could talk us through the pros and cons of this technology, deliver on-going support with our existing telephony estate and design and deliver a number of projects in our rolling programme of changes.
We have developed a very good working relationship with Central’s engineers, they are like an extension of our team, and together we are delivering a flexible working solution to improve citizen contact and flexible working solutions.’
