Chris Johnson: You know, what does that process look like for upgrading and updating everything so that that new agent can get right in and start working? So a lot of those processes, because everything was cloud hosted, you know, we didn't have to come on site to work, do that work. We could not only support them remotely, but we could automate a lot of those things because there's, there's tooling and things built in on the cloud side that allowed us to, uh, build templates and automate things and, Uh, really just add a lot of efficiency to those types of daily operations.
Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, we have a great customer conversation. It's the City of Independence. Really interesting journey from traditional Avaya to Microsoft Teams, Five9, using Audio Codes, Intelepeer, all with AVI SPL. Amazing story of a two year journey, multiple sites, multiple different use cases, really interesting insights into how the journey went and also how they're operating now.
Many thanks to City of Independence and Chris for taking the time to join the podcast. And many thanks to AVI SPL, who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support. Hope you enjoy the conversation and on with the show. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. You know, we like to hear customer stories on the podcast, and this is a really great one.
And I really like it when we get into things that are not just classic enterprise. And this is definitely an unusual one. Chris, if I could start with you, please introduce yourself.
Chris Johnson: Yeah, so I'm Chris Johnson. I am an IT manager for the City of Independence, Missouri. We are a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, so right smack in the middle of the United States, in the heartland, the Midwest.
And we're a city of about 220, 000 people. The local government here is about 2, 000 users. And so we support all of those users for all of our internal IT services, telephone, things like that. So, I've been with the city for five years now. And we've gone through a lot of transformation during that time.
And that's of course what we're going to talk about today.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So Chris, you came in five years ago or so. Um, talk us, talk us through that because you've been on a massive transformation to cloud, to Teams, to Five9s, the whole voice journey. But where did it start?
Chris Johnson: Yeah, so when I was hired five years ago, the city was running on an old Avaya analog phone system with multiple PBXs.
Uh, it was very complicated, complex, uh, it was, had kind of grown over time, so it started as a very small system and then kind of had bolt on additions over the years, uh, but was never really managed or configured holistically to account for all the growth that had happened within the organization, and so it was very difficult for us to manage that, uh, just from daily operations, from troubleshooting, uh, even, even hardware repair, we were literally buying parts off of eBay.
Uh, to replace power supplies and fan modules and things like that for some of that hardware. So, uh, just not very sustainable, not a, not a good level of service for our users. And so we built a multi year plan, uh, to upgrade all of the city's infrastructure. Those issues weren't unique to just the phone system.
Uh, our network was also out of date. All of our remote access was out of date. And so we, we needed to do a full upgrade of, of really everything and kind of transform and modernize all of our technology for the city. Uh, because it's very important we support all city departments, so public safety, police and fire, EMS, plus the city runs all of the utilities.
So we have the electric utility, uh, water and wastewater, uh, are all run by the city.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, so these are critical, critical services and really diverse services as well, which is really interesting. I mean, like, 2, 000 users doesn't do it justice of the level of Right. Locations and departments. Is it 20 locations?
Like?
Chris Johnson: Yeah. So all, all total, we've got about 30 city buildings. Uh, 20 of those have occupants where, where there's people that are working in those facilities, uh, and then another 10 or so are, are unoccupied, uh, facilities, but they still have connectivity and, and services that we have to deliver there. So.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Um, was going to the cloud like the obvious choice? Did you look at different options? How did you arrive at kind of Teams and M365?
Chris Johnson: Yeah, so we did, we did look at all of the options. We considered staying on prem. We considered going all in on the cloud and then of course some level of hybrid solution as well.
And we kind of landed on a hybrid solution. So certain services we've kept on prem. Awesome. Uh, so we do still run two data centers, kind of as a primary and a backup data center or disaster recovery data center. Uh, and so a lot of our services are hosted there, uh, on prem, but we, we had already deployed Microsoft 365 as kind of our primary collaboration tool and office tool.
So for email and, you know, Word, PowerPoint, all those sorts of things, uh, that was already our tool. It was already what our users were familiar with. And so it just made it a very easy. transition to roll Teams into that as well, uh, and then expand that Teams deployment to include the telephony services, uh, to provide that.
And so, uh, you know, we looked at some, some of the other vendors out there that provide cloud hosted, uh, telephones over SIP, but they all required another application to be installed on the endpoint. And so it was just another tool that we would have to manage. It's another tool that users would have to learn.
Uh, so we just felt like that adoption was not going to be as easy. Uh, for our users. As a city government, we're not a technical organization, uh, and so many of our users, uh, really are, are kind of challenged, uh, when it comes to technology and they, they struggled to learn new things. And so
Tom Arbuthnot: So that simplicity then is really important.
It's like the same tool you've already been using. We're just bringing the phone into that experience. Your meeting and your phone is the same, same experience as well.
Chris Johnson: Yeah, exactly. Anything we can do to make it easier for our users. Uh, is really a big priority for us because that's, that's ultimately what's going to drive our success for any projects that we do.
Tom Arbuthnot: What are your contact center scenarios and what kind of new capabilities did that unlock for you?
Chris Johnson: Sure, so we, we have one primary contact center, uh, here within the city, uh, what we refer to as Utilities Customer Service. So it's a, it's a single phone number that residents of the community can call for any of the three utilities that the city provides.
Uh, so they can get help with their electric bill, like their water cutoffs, water, you know, things like that. Um, and so, they handle all of those calls, uh, for all the residents of the city, and so they're pretty busy. Uh, we typically run anywhere from 15 to 25 agents on that contact center, uh, and they are full all day from open to close.
And, uh, there's one of the, one of the big challenges that we had was very extended hold times when, uh, residents would call into those, that number for support, uh, because it just, they just couldn't process through things quick enough because they had multiple systems. They'd have to look at one system for.
Uh, resident information, they'd have to look at another system for billing, they'd have to look at another system for managing services and, you know, disconnects and turn ons and things like that. And so, there was just a lot of wasted time, there weren't very efficient workflows for those agents on those calls.
Uh, and so those were, those were some of the problems that we were trying to tackle. Uh, and we looked at several different solutions and ultimately settled on Five9 because it just looked like it was going to meet all of those needs, as well as provide new capabilities that we did not previously have, uh, such as using some automated, uh, call flows, automated, uh, workflows, pulling in, uh, information from multiple systems and presenting all of that in one interface, uh, for the agent to, to simplify their workflows.
Uh, and really streamline those operations and through all that, ultimately, what we've seen is a significant decrease in those hold times. Uh, and we've actually received a lot of feedback from residents within the community that they're very happy with the new service, uh, and that they see those changes being good.
So it's been nice.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. Do the agents, are the agents all physically in the same building or are they?
Chris Johnson: They are. So initially, all of the agents were physical or on prem. So they shared an office and they kind of all sat in a cubicle farm and worked close with each other. Another benefit of moving to Five9 is now we've allowed them to go virtual. And so now some of those agents are able to work remotely and don't have to come into the office to be able to do that job.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's really interesting. I heard from another customer that that had helped with like staff retention and happiness in the contact center and ability to recruit different people with different working schedules and habits as well.
Chris Johnson: Right, yeah, you can imagine, like, not a lot of people love that type of job role.
Tom Arbuthnot: No, it's a hard, hard role to be constantly, constantly dealing with inbound, definitely.
Chris Johnson: Yeah, your customer's never happy, right? When they're calling to complain about their bill or, you know, whatever that may be.
Tom Arbuthnot: It's rare they call in just to say thanks, you know.
Chris Johnson: Right, right. So, so anything we can do to make the agent's life easier or more comfortable. Uh, is, is really a, a, a very big impact, uh, on their just quality of life and, and, and their role in, in that with our company. And so, uh, it's very helpful, especially for them to be able to go remote and virtual, um, but just to not be confined to the office space all the time has been really, really big for just morale and, and overall just effectiveness of that team.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And take us through the kind of, uh, project journey. Cause originally you planned to do this over multiple years and you managed to bring it into two years for the, all, all the voice. I think it was the Audio Codes you moved to for the voice routing Teams, Five9, that's a lot in two years over 30 sites.
Well, what did that, how did that work? How did that come together?
Chris Johnson: Yeah, it, it really was. And, and you know, this, this is where AVI SPL was such a critical partner for us because they brought in the, the, not only the project management skills. Uh, and the consulting skills, but they actually brought in technical folks as well, subject matter experts, uh, for all of the solutions that we were deploying, uh, and they really guided us and really led us through that entire journey.
And so, uh, we built the initial project plan and schedule, uh, which was initially just for the Five9 piece was about a year, uh, and we were able to accelerate that down to just a few months, uh, to get to the point where we're actually doing user acceptance testing, uh, from the time that we did the initial rollout.
And so, uh, that actually progressed very quickly, uh, and we were very happy with that. Um, we're able to immediately put that into service. Uh, as we continued working on other infrastructure upgrades, uh, which was really nice because that, that contact center is really kind of our, our first line of defense against, or, or with residents, um, that's their first interaction with the city.
And so it's really, it was really nice to be able to accelerate that. And get those upgrades out there, uh, in a way that the public could see and experience that.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And Chris, what does it look like, um, kind of your operations and BAU now? Because it's interesting when people move to the cloud, the operational model changes.
You're now on kind of a constant rotation of changing the cloud as well. How do you guys manage that?
Chris Johnson: Yeah, so that was definitely a learning curve for us. Prior to this, everything we had was on prem. So we owned all of that maintenance cycle. We owned all of that. And so figuring out what did that look like?
What changes and efficiencies did we gain? And then how do we maximize those and really build those into our day to day operational cycles? And you know, how we're managing this. We're a very small team for those 2, 000 users. Uh, when we first started this, there were only 10 of us, uh, supporting those 2, 000 people.
And so, uh, that ratio just generates a lot of work, uh, for my team. And so, uh, figuring out how to, how to maximize those efficiencies that the cloud does provide, uh, was really a key part of this. And so looking at those upgrade cycles, those software patching.
Uh, Vulnerability Assessments, things of that nature, uh, for more of a security and management side, but then also just from the daily operational side, when there's a new agent that comes on board or somebody that off boards, you know, what does that process look like for upgrading and updating everything so that that new agent can get right in and start working?
Uh, so a lot of those processes, because everything was cloud hosted, you know, we didn't have to come on site to work, do that work. We could not only support them remotely, but we could automate a lot of those things because there's, there's tooling and things built in on the cloud side that allowed us to, uh, build templates and automate things and, uh, really just add a lot of efficiency to those types of daily operations.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's quite, especially, and again, in that two year span, it's quite a drastic change of, uh, operational style to go from, you know, Classic, classic prem to, to, to cloud and the pace that just, uh, you talked about, you know, simplicity, but during that two years. And I guess since as well, you will have got a whole lot of additional features from, from Teams that, that, that, you know, making the most of that is quite interesting.
Chris Johnson: Yeah, you know, looking at for one of the, one of the big features that we implemented, uh, was multilingual support. So, uh, prior, prior to this, uh, prior to Five9, all of our, all of our contact center was English only. Uh, but we do have a large population in our community that is Spanish speaking. And so with this, we were able to implement a multilingual menu system, uh, so that when folks call in, uh, they can speak in a language that's natural to them and still get the help and the support that they need, uh, and also get routed automatically to an agent, uh, that is able to speak their language as well.
Uh, and so that kind of automated routing based on, uh, Multilingual support was really big for us, as well as we were able to implement multi mode support. So now not only can you call, but you can go on the website, you can even chat. So there's a lot of different opportunities now to interact between residents and those agents to get the support that they need.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's great when technology like that can bring new capabilities to your service. That multilingual sounds like a huge win for the citizens, definitely. Yep. Awesome. So, uh, I guess it'd be interesting from the customer perspective, like it's quite hard to push that change within on the customer side as well.
Like how, how would you suggest customers approach that?
Chris Johnson: Yeah. Change is always hard. Uh, and especially when you take a non technical user and you implement this massive kind of holistic technology change. Uh, there, there was a lot of, a lot of back and forth, a lot of sort of user education, user training that we did.
Uh, we, we really kind of went over the top with our communications. Uh, we went over the top with the resources that we provided, uh, to our users. Uh, you know, normally we roll something out on a smaller scale. We'll, we'll, we'll record some video training or provide some user guides and things. Uh, but this, with this, we actually went on site and provided hands on, face to face training, uh, and really just kind of went that extra mile for our users to make sure that that adoption and that change, uh, really, really took hold for them.
Uh, we're able to be right there in front of them, answer any questions, help them figure things out, uh, and really get that immediate adoption, uh, of the system, uh, right away and, and kind of decrease and shorten that timeline, uh, to adoption. So that was, that was a big deal for us. Um, and then I kind of, you know, that, that's on the implementation side, on, on the planning side.
Uh, being able to convince city leadership, uh, the folks who hold, hold the checkbook, uh, you know, why are we doing this? Uh, and, and is, is it really necessary? And the analogy that I often use is it's like a car. Uh, we can drive our car, we can buy a car, uh, but does it have seat belts? Does it have airbags?
Does it have bumpers? Like, there's all these safety and security features that are built into your car, but you don't think about those things, right? You just think about, I put gas in it and I drive where I need to go. Right? Um, but all those things are built in and they're all there and they're all critical to your safety, uh, in using that car.
And so it's similar with these new technology systems like the user end, the front side is very important, but it's also important to make sure that all of the other systems that make that work well are, are, are there as well. And so being able to explain that and look at that, uh, really helped in, in being able to get the approval to move forward.
Tom Arbuthnot: I like the analogy. I might, I might steal that, Chris. That's a good one. We're driving a 10 year old car here, guys. Might be time for a change. Awesome. Well, Chris, thank you so much for sharing the insights and the experience. Amazing two year transformation there. Really impressive. And, uh, hope to talk to you soon.
Chris Johnson: Awesome. Thank you very much.