Client industry:
Local government
Size of company:
220 employees
About the client:
The town of Morrisville in North Carolina is a technology-driven community with highly engaged residents. They even have a resident-led Smart City Steering Committee that aims to keep Morrisville on the cutting edge of innovation. The committee’s primary goal is to make sure the town’s technology investments help the community without creating barriers between residents and the local government.
Challenge:
Rick Ralph, CIO for the town of Morrisville, noticed that the town’s legacy phone system was more of a hindrance than a help to both government staff and local residents. The system was plagued by outages and received regular complaints for how complicated it was to use. In one satisfaction survey, the phone system was ranked dead last.
Ralph turned to Insight, the town’s technology partner, for suggestions on a new, cloud-based phone system that would be a better fit for the town’s future endeavors.
Solution:
Based on the client’s given criteria (a simple and cloud-based phone solution), Insight named a few options. The 8x8® eXperience Communications Platform was on the short list of the most popular cloud-based phone systems. When paired with Microsoft Teams® Voice, users would be able to make and receive calls from any Teams-enabled endpoint.
According to Ralph, “8x8 fit the bill. It matched all our criteria for modernizing our communications.” In less than a month, the town of Morrisville went live with its 8x8 implementation.
Results:
The implementation of the new phone system went unbelievably smoothly. “This is a big system that we had to replace,” said Ralph. “We anticipated having more down time and more issues than we actually had.”
Danny Reilly, Morrisville’s IT operations manager said, “It was one of the smoothest transitions in my career in IT.” When asked why he thought the transition was so easy, Ralph believed that the town’s relationship with Insight and 8x8 had a lot to do with it.
“They took the time to understand what was different about Morrisville,” he said. “I don’t think they came in thinking that we were like every other local government agency. They came in to understand our challenges and then they were able to deliver and effectively show how the 8x8 system could accomplish what we were trying to do.”
Since the phone system upgrade, the town of Morrisville now has more flexible communications with greater mobility than ever before. The town has also experienced a rise in residents using the self-service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to get information faster. The town of Morrisville is now one step closer to its goal of becoming a smart city with cutting edge technology that makes life easier.
