Shoalhaven deploys IP telephony

The Shoalhaven City Council in New South Wales has selected an Interactive Intelligence solution as its unified communications platform following a competitive tender process administered by PABX Advisory Services Pty Ltd for the GCT-T5 Tender.

The solution forms part of the council’s investment in IP telephony, associated services and infrastructure, including new optical fibre cabling and a data network upgrade.

“We selected Interactive Intelligence following a review of two other shortlisted systems. For council’s customers, it will both improve and standardise the council experience they receive with calls routed to the right person in a process that will be faster and more efficient. In addition, the architecture’s in-built redundancy will provide us with business continuity enabling us to route calls to different locations in times of emergencies,”said John Rushton, Communications and Electrical Manager, Shoalhaven City Council.

The Interactive Intelligence all-in-one IP communications software suite, Customer Interaction Center (CIC), will boost customer service with more effective call management. CIC will provide the council with a single software platform that incorporates a fully featured IP PBX application suite and multimedia contact centre built for VoIP. In addition, the council has selected Polycom IP handsets as part of the rollout due to their high-quality voice and tight integration with Interactive Intelligence.

The system has been implemented by Interactive Intelligence’s elite partner, CallTime Solutions. CIC will connect 680 business users and contact centre employees over six sites in its initial phase of implementation. These include two main administration offices in Nowra and Ulladulla, the council library, regional tourist centre and two council depots.

In the second phase, CIC will be deployed across smaller sites on a cost-benefit basis. CIC will also be deployed for contact centre and business users at the Shoalhaven Emergency Operations Centre and regional Rural Fire Service.

CIC is hosted in a Sydney data centre and connects through to all council sites in Nowra via a 10 MB microwave network link and an intra-council virtual private network.

CIC replaces the council’s 12-year-old GPT-Plessey PABX system, which was increasingly difficult to support and had limited contact centre functionality to scale with customer demand for council services and the region’s overall population growth.

CIC will also integrate with the council’s existing MERIT CRM system while the solution’s built-in call and screen recording, supervisory monitoring and agent screen pop-ups will enable the council to track each call. This will help improve training, documentation and quality assurance.