Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council

Partner Authorities all have individual legacy telephony solutions with limited unified communication capability.

Contact centre solutions, wires, billing, application interfaces, customer payment solutions, voicemail and mobile / flexible telephony are all disparate and perform as separate solutions each at cost to partner authorities. 

Each organisations capability has developed incrementally, with bolt-ons, over time. 

This strategy benefitted service delivery for individual organisations at the time although it is now believed that by adopting a single Alpha solution the partnership will revolutionise service delivery and bring communications capabilities normally associated with private sector to our staff and customers alike.

The project is to design and implement a repeatable installation and adoption strategy that can be followed by all partners and that can be extended to other organisations wanting to adopt similar.

Objectives:

·         One single cloud hosted solution

·         One number per user, desk based/mobile or softphones

·         Modern unified communication functionality –integrating MS Office, instant messaging, video and conference calling

·         One single contact centre solution – separately configured and implemented for partners

·         Integrated Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

·         One single support contract (bills, lines, calls, technologies)

 The new solution will give staff the opportunity to work in a more flexible way facilitating contact arrangements from any location.

Discovery evidence

Over the last 12 months we have been working in collaboration with our partners to define an approach to provide a modern, robust communication solution for customer facing and back office staff to engage with residents and local commerce.

We have engaged users on a series of investigations into the existing Unified Communication (UC) and Contact Centre (CC) estates with Leicestershire ICT Partnership Authorities. Objectives included gathering functional insight into the existing UC and CC estates, and to understand strategic objectives in regard to internal and external communication.

We have held events across all partnership sites defined as ‘Ready Days’ to experience first hand the day to day challenges Contact Centre staff face when managing customers and to capture high level requirements based on work flows.

Following this, we then validated findings from the ‘ready day’ sessions, in order to present a tailored business case aiming to solve issues highlighted, which exist across the four councils.

High level cost/benefit analysis of three options for meeting the business need was undertaken and demonstration of the preferred solution held at each partner site.  A summary of some of the benefits have been listed below: