City of York Council found having a traditional voice network was costly and office staff were unnecessarily deskbound. Moving staff from one location to another caused an extensive workload for the telecoms team, as moves, additions and changes are time consuming and costly. When staff worked outside of the office, workers did not have access to the central data network and phone calls had to be made using a mobile phone, which was both costly and impractical.
The Council determined that by replacing its stand-alone analogue voice system with an IP communications network, it could reduce ongoing communications costs, enable its network to evolve with the business and introduce new applications into the workplace.
"The Mitel IP Telephony system integrates seamlessly with the Cisco data network and voice calls no longer require a separate network to travel on," explained Roy Grant, head of IT operational services at City of York Council. "This has enabled us to centralise communications across the council, giving the main accommodation sites the same access to communications. As a result we have been able to improve communications both internally and with the public, thereby improving public services.
The introduction of Mitel IP Telephony means that we can now offer our employees the option of working from home with the office like network access, which will help us to retain talented workers and improve their work-life balance.
The Mitel Networked Business Solution immediately offered reduced communications costs for the City of York Council through toll-free calls across the council's different sites. The 2,500 system users, including administration, human resources, finance, public services, housing and planning staff, can now take advantage of the sophisticated communications applications brought about by using the 3300 ICP.
Due to the success of a mini Mitel call centre to administer a small selection of its services, using its new communications capabilities, the City of York council has plans to deploy a Customer Contact Centre Solution to cover a wider range of services.”
In the future, City of York Council aims to consolidate its numerous separate accommodation sites into just one green field development. Using IP Communications, all moves, additions and changes can be managed online, so that technical staff can focus more on core tasks and less on network maintenance. The council now has a flexible IP communications system that will evolve with their business and has resulted in a more agile operation.