City of Lakewood

Local governments face constant challenges in fulfilling their constituents’ requirements. The City of Lakewood, Colorado, a thriving Denver suburb, deals with thousands of phone calls daily and every call needs a response. Recreation centers must effectively process class registrations during peak enrollment times, public works must respond quickly to utility locator requests, and thousands of calls may occur during a snowstorm. The police department alone handles hundreds of non-emergency calls daily. Reliable communications are the lifeblood of the city.

“We want to ensure that every call into the city’s offices reaches the right person as quickly as possible.”
— Boris Naschansky, CIO, City of Lakewood.

Lakewood’s 22-year-old phone system became increasingly costly and time-consuming to maintain. It offered limited features for the 1,200 full-time and part-time employees located at over two dozen offices across the city. In addition to replacing the system, the city sought to consolidate communications between city hall, multiple facilities, and field personnel, and to make it easier for citizens to reach a staff member directly. Equally critical was that it be reliable, cost-effective, and easy to implement and maintain.

“On the old system incoming calls rang three times at one desk, three times at the next, and so on, finally ringing in the director’s office, by which time if the party was still on the line, they were frustrated. Getting stuck in the cycle of returning calls and leaving voicemails back and forth was just not productive.”
— Boris Naschansky, CIO, City of Lakewood.

It was the system’s ease of use and ability to streamline management tasks that drove the decision to go with ShoreTel. The Lakewood team was also impressed that ShoreTel reseller partners receive their incentives based on their customer satisfaction scores. A key element of the deployment included taking advantage of ShoreTel’s open, distributed architecture to integrate a call recording system that enables police investigators to record calls with witnesses, suspects, and other persons of interest. Other benefits include:

• Improved service delivery to constituents across all city departments, as calls can quickly be forwarded to the right person.
• Five-nine availability for service 24/7/365 while reducing support costs and freeing-up internal staff time.
• ShoreTel Core Software includes a powerful voice messaging system that features user-configurable call handling options and find-me routing. The voice messaging system can be accessed visually from ShoreTel Call Manager or the user’s Microsoft^® Outlook^® inbox.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform, scales with plug-and-play simplicity, lowering acquisition and maintenance costs and bringing down overall total cost of ownership.

“ShoreTel’s simple, Web-based system management interface has made life significantly easier, and we’re much more productive compared to the old system. Now we can make changes in a matter of minutes. We no longer have to call out contractors, or need to invest in specialized phone system certification training.”
— Shawn Cullingford, Telecommunications Engineer, City of Lakewood.