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City of Charles Sturt Improves Flexibility and Productivity with Mitel Unified Communications

Announcement posted by Mitel 07 Jun 2011

Mitel (NASDAQ: MITL), a leading provider of unified communications software solutions, announced that City of Charles Sturt has successfully implemented a Mitel unified communications solution across their entire organisation. The solution has allowed Council to improve the flexibility and productivity of customer service delivery across key areas of the organisation.

The City of Charles Sturt is the local government region situated to the west of the Central Business District of Adelaide, South Australia. Council services a population of approximately 105,000 residents, providing services such as road maintenance, waste collection, recycling, property planning, and heritage protection. In addition, Council administers key community facilities, such as libraries, and sporting facilities.

Janelle Sollitto, Acting Manager Information Services for City of Charles Sturt commented, “Our organisation delivers a wide range of services for the community, so ensuring our team is easily accessible to the public is a key concern. In 2010, we decided it was time to improve our ability to communicate between our various offices, and streamline customer service delivery. To achieve this, our goal was to build on a platform that could flexibly handle our needs for many years.”

After undertaking a tender process evaluating solutions from multiple vendors, a Mitel unified communication solution based on Mitel’s Freedom architecture was chosen. The solution is comprised of the Mitel Communications Director (MCD), Mitel Contact Center Enterprise, Mitel Intelligent Queue, and Mitel Live Business Gateway.

Council services are delivered by a team of 450 employees, with the majority of employees located at large facilities at the Civic and Beverley Centres. The central library and most customer services are based at the Civic Centre, with approximately 250 employees working in the building. Field service employees handling maintenance of property, parks, roads, and sporting facilities are based at the Beverley Centre. In addition, Council operates a further four library branches, and five small community centres. All locations are connected via a private IP wide area network.

The primary MCD is located in the Civic Centre, with a second in the Beverley Centre. The entire solution is configured to provide a seamless service across all locations, with the ability for automatic failover in the event of a fault or communications disruption. The solution was designed and implemented by Data Mobility Voice, an accredited Mitel premierPARTNER based in South Australia. DataMobility Voice will also provide ongoing technical support services for the communications infrastructure.

To minimise disruptions to the organisation, the entire project was implemented in a single stage in May 2010, following Council’s upgrade to power over ethernet LAN switches. Advanced Mitel 5360 IP Phones were deployed for each desk, incorporating colour touch screens, and support for high performance gigabit speed networking. Each phone offers one touch access to communications features, as well as the ability to access custom web content, and interactive applications.

Janelle Sollitto continued, “The Civic Centre is the key contact point for many of our interactions with residents, with some of our team members serving people across both the front desk and via phone inquiries. These staff members can now see on their computer screens how many customers are waiting to be served, and which colleagues are available to help, which makes it much easier for them to balance their workload. Mitel Intelligent Queue has allowed us to improve the flexibility of our contact centre, making it possible for us to easily tailor announcements, automatically redirect calls, and present customers with interactive options.”
An organisation-wide single employee directory for phone communications has been implemented, which greatly simplifies administration of employee moves and changes. The IT help desk team can easily make routine changes to configurations and call handling settings, and have integrated the solution with the Microsoft application environment used by Council. The Mitel solution also allows automatically scheduled web-based reports to be produced, providing further visibility into customer service delivery.

Janelle Sollitto commented further, ”Our migration to the Mitel solution was rapid and smooth. We have integrated Microsoft Office Communications Server, which allows staff to see presence information for their colleagues – enabling them to quickly direct calls to available colleagues, without dialing multiple extensions. Mitel has helped us to improve the efficiency and customer service delivery of our front desk and contact centre teams, without increasing our budgeted costs.”
Gwilym Funnell, Mitel vice president for Asia Pacific commented, “The latest contact centre technologies offer many opportunities to tailor customer service delivery without increasing your headcount. Mitel’s Freedom Architecture helps organisations to simplify the administration of their communications systems, while flexibly deploying the latest contact centre automation and reporting tools.”

About Mitel

Mitel (Nasdaq:MITL) is a global provider of business communications and collaboration software and services. Mitel’s Freedom architecture provides the flexibility and simplicity organisations need to support today’s dynamic work environment. Through a single cloud-ready software stream, Mitel delivers a powerful suite of advanced communications and collaboration capabilities that provides freedom from walled garden architectures and enables organisations to implement best-of-breed solutions on any network; extends the "in-office" experience anywhere, on any device; and offers choice of commercial options to fit business needs. For more information visit: http://www.mitel.com

About City of Charles Sturt

The City of Charles Sturt is the local government region situated to the west of the Central Business District of Adelaide, South Australia. Council services a population of approximately 105,000 residents, delivering services such as road maintenance, waste collection, recycling, property planning, and heritage protection. In addition, Council administers key community facilities, such as libraries, community centres and sporting facilities.

About Data Mobility Voice

Data Mobility Voice (DMV) is a telecommunications company based in Adelaide. Founded in 1996, DMV delivers a broad range of voice systems, data networks, mobile and wireless solutions, for businesses and government agencies. By implementing technologies such as unified communications and virtualisation, DMV helps clients to improve their business efficiency, employee productivity, and profitability. For more information visit: www.dmv.net.au

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