Rutland County Council

The Challenge

Like all organisations, the Council had to move quickly to react to the Corona Virus pandemic in 2020 when circumstances dictated that all staff work away from the office.

Of particular concern was the continuity of the Council's contact centre, crucial for the support of the elderly and vulnerable as well as fielding all telephone enquiries into the Council.

Outside of this, provision would need to be made for the support of all staff with no access to the Council's office facilities.

The Solution

Mason Infotech were able to establish a contact centre within 48 hours. This facilitated around 20 home workers to act as 'agents' and be available to take calls in exactly the same way as when they were office based. Calls were received and routed via two separate telephone numbers and presented to the agents using applications on their laptops.

As a crucial communications tool in normal times, the criticality of the service rose substantially during the pandemic. The solution was able to provide management information to ensure calls were routed and answered by the appropriate staff within reasonable time.

With both real time and historic reporting the contact centre performance was easy to manage day to day whilst keeping all interested parties up to date on performance.

As the pandemic continued the Council had to turn its attention to the remaining home workers. As it became clear that the Council's offices would have to remain closed indefinitely, a solution was needed to allow the Council's 400+ staff communicate effectively with each other, suppliers, partners and the Counties residents.

After some careful planning and rigorous testing, the Council were able to replace fixed desk telephones with a solution that presented calls to all staff using laptop PC's and headsets, ideal for home working. As the adoption of hybrid working practices develops this same solution can accommodate flexible and home/office working in a very effective and efficient manner.

The best in Hosted Telephony

Mason Infotech's solution was delivered using Cisco's Broadsoft platform. The management of the platform is undertaken using a cloud based portal. Accessed via a standard browser the portal offers full management of the business, locations, users and facilities, replacing traditional telephony and broadening the range of services available.

Total Flexibility

Working with a variety of different 'endpoints' including traditional handsets and 'softphone' applications including Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, the solution delivers everything a traditional 'on premise' system would deliver, and more, in a flexible 'work from anywhere environment'.

As a cloud based service, Broadsoft reduces the need for capital spend and increases flexibility being offered on a per user per month license. This increases the agility of any enterprise to react to client, commercial and environmental changes and demands.