Brimbank City Council in Victoria has announced ShoreTel is its chosen vendor for a new unified communications (UC) solution that will be the backbone of a bigger upgrade.
According to a statement, Brimbank will replace its current telephony and contact centre infrastructure with a ShoreTel Connect UC platform.
The new solution will form the basis of a comprehensive revamp of systems to enhance Brimbank's delivery of services to its community of almost 200,000 residents.
ShoreTel Connect Onsite is now available in Australia, and Brimbank will be the first major implementation of the new platform locally.
ShoreTel Connect, the biggest release in the company's history, is a new single UC platform that can be delivered as a product or as a service.
Brimbank will deploy ShoreTel Connect Onsite including ShoreTel Contact Center and ShoreTel Mobility across 29 locations for more than 700 council staff, with the joint project between ShoreTel partner Flexnet and Brimbank's own IT department expected to be completed by the end of February 2016.
Brimbank underwent a rigorous tender process for its new UC solution, and selected ShoreTel for the ease of use and simplicity of the platform.
The council saw ShoreTel Connect in beta version, and chose to deploy the new platform based on its user experience and functionality.
Frédéric Gillant, ShoreTel vice president and managing director Asia Pacific, says, “Our success at Brimbank is reflective of the groundswell of local councils that have selected ShoreTel in the recent past with more than 10,000 ends now managed in this vertical by ShoreTel partners in Australia.
“The success of any UC solution is based on the user uptake of its rich collaboration features. With ShoreTel Connect, we have focused our attention on the user interface by ensuring all the features available are intuitive, consistent and simple to use. I'm pleased that Brimbank highlighted this as an important reason for its decision to choose ShoreTel," he says.
Brimbank plans to cut over a number of new sites each week, conducting training sessions with Flexnet on the new ShoreTel system at those sites on Tuesdays and Wednesdays before deploying the new phones and software to users on Thursdays.
The training will cover basic telephony features and also more advanced applications including instant messaging, conferencing and web sharing.
The council's goal is to see a higher level of customer service responsiveness across the organisation with ShoreTel's collaboration features, sophisticated contact centre functionality and the extension of rich UC to mobile devices.
“Our council operations are spread across many sites so we are looking forward to using presence and instant messaging to more easily re-direct calls and collaborate with our colleagues.
"Our contact centre will also benefit from additional capabilities and integration with third party applications to track calls and better understand customer trends,” says Helen Morrissey, Brimbank City Council director corporate and community relations.
“The ShoreTel platform is a key component of our broader set of initiatives to enhance customer service at Brimbank. We have a strong focus on finding the best technology available to provide our community with excellent customer service.
"We will be looking for opportunities to integrate ShoreTel in a number of customer service projects we have planned, including a new website presence and the introduction of a new customer database," she says.