Telephony and contact centre upgrade for Kalgoorlie–Boulder

Operating and managing ICT infrastructure and solutions across a remote part of Australia is a challenge for any local government organisation. That’s made even more difficult when the area covered is roughly the size of Iceland and you are responsible for most of the facilities and services in the region, including the airport, golf course and waste water systems.

The City of Kalgoorlie–Boulder, approximately 600 km east of Perth, is one of the most diverse and geographically dispersed local governments in Australia and it recently undertook a broad project to upgrade its entire IT environment, including its microwave links between sites, and physical server and storage infrastructure.

Mitigating operational risk

The upgrade also encompassed the City’s core telephony and contact centre platforms.

“All these projects were important to improve our overall compliance in mitigating operational risks,” explained City of Kalgoorlie–Boulder’s ICT manager Alyce Spokes.

A good example of the sort of operational risk the City faced was its aging on-premise PABX.

“We had to restart it every single night to keep it working. If we didn’t, during the day the phone calls would just drop out,” Spokes said.

The City also struggled with an outdated contact centre that offered limited functionality and had minimal reporting capabilities. Creating new users and onboarding new customer service agents was a difficult process that could take days to complete.

Cloud-based solution

After reviewing various options, the City chose to implement RingCentral’s integrated unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centre as a service (CCaaS) solution. The cloud-based service ensured the City could operate on a single enterprise telephony platform, despite the limited connectivity (including 4G only in some instances) available at its more remote sites.

Purchasing the RingCentral solution through the WA Local Government Association (WALGA) Preferred Supplier Panel was a big advantage, Spokes said. “The WALGA panel is good for local governments because it has already vetted the suppliers, so it does take some of the steps out for us. We started the process in July and August 2021, and we had implementation in September.”

One of the key criteria for the City was the integration of the UCaaS solution with Microsoft Teams. The impact of this integration has been significant. While all staff had access to Teams, only 5–10% had been using it. That percentage had increased to 83% Teams utilisation in just three months with the addition of RingCentral’s embedded contact functionality.

The deployment of the RingCentral mobile app, so that staff devices also operate as a full company phone, has been another important step in improving overall communication and responsiveness.

“A lot of our staff are rarely in the office or at their desks, but only having a mobile phone or simply transferring calls to our mobiles doesn’t always make it easy to contact someone. It also doesn’t give you any awareness or visibility on what’s coming through to our phones,” Spokes said.

Integrated UCaaS and CCaaS delivers

According to Spokes, the combination of an integrated, fully featured UCaaS and CCaaS environment that is available across all sites as well as to mobile staff has seen a significant improvement in the customer experience (CX) for the City’s ratepayers.

“The ability for our staff to be contactable anywhere, the communication between all of our sites and being able to connect our ratepayers with the correct person have made a big difference in the experience ratepayers have when they are dealing with us.

“The reporting functionality in RingCentral Contact Centre means that we can start to track what our customer experience is actually looking like — how quickly phone calls are being answered, how many are being resolved on the first instance, and other data that will help us improve the ratepayer experience as a whole,” Spokes continued.

Now that the solution is in place, the City will be focusing on using RingCentral’s reporting to tailor its internal training, and making sure that ratepayers are getting the assistance they need when they are contacting the City. That will be augmented by plans to integrate RingCentral with the City’s TechnologyOne Ci Anywhere platform when ratepayers call in for advanced record-keeping and deeper business insights.