City of Camarillo

The California city of Camarillo is a thriving community of 66,000 people, located between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Residents appreciate the unspoiled, friendly, clean, and safe environment that attracts caring neighbors and nurtures quality schools. A key reason for its high quality of life is a city government that focuses on openness and accessibility and understands how to identify and respond to its citizens’ concerns.

“The reason we’re satisfied with ShoreTel is simple. The system meets our needs and works well, all at an attractive price point."
— Richard Petropulos, Director of General Services, City of Camarillo.

When Camarillo’s residents call city services, they expect to be treated in accordance with the city’s commitment to constituent satisfaction, not to be put on hold endlessly or to be shuttled to voicemail. So when the time came to replace the city’s aging PBX system, the IT team had these high service expectations top-of-mind. In addition, they sought a system that offered configurable call handling with integrated presence information that could be easily and economically maintained in-house.

“We knew we made the right decision. No one had any complaints, and all the feedback we received was positive. Everyone loved the ShoreTel system, and nobody wanted to go back.”
— Richard Petropulos, Director of General Services, City of Camarillo.

Following extensive research, a visit to an existing ShoreTel customer convinced the team. They were particularly impressed with the extensive features, such as hunt groups, that ensured all calls were answered. The new ShoreTel system was installed in the library in February 2007 and proved to be the most seamless implementation of a major product the team had ever seen. Rollout to the city hall, the corporate yard, and the “Old Courthouse” building followed the next year. The ShoreTel system helped reduce the city’s operating expenses, cutting annual phone system costs in half and eliminating about $4,500 in service calls per year. Other benefits include:

• Rapid return on investment, thanks to ShoreTel’s competitive pricing and the system’s ease of management, which lets moves, adds, and changes be performed from anywhere on the network.
• ShoreTel’s flexibility makes it easy to meet unique departmental communications requirements.
• The system’s open, distributed architecture delivers rock solid reliability and high availability, both of which are key to serving constituents.
• Desktop integration with Microsoft^® Outlook^® and call control like never before streamline business processes and increase productivity.
• ShoreTel’s feature-rich set — including workgroups, hunt groups, and emergency notification — expands the city’s capacity for serving its citizens.

“ShoreTel was the most cost-effective system and it was visibly easy to implement, manage, and use.”
— Richard Petropulos, Director of General Services, City of Camarillo.