Fort Worth Transportation Authority

The Fort Worth Transportation Authority (“The T”) provides quality public transportation to meet the mobility needs of Tarrant County and the North Central Texas region. The T, with over 200 administrative employees and located in three locations across Fort Worth, provides service to more than eight million passengers annually on buses, vanpools, and the Trinity Railway Express (TRE), the commuter and passenger rail between Fort Worth and Dallas.

“We envisioned a system for our call center that would let us monitor calls and attach voicemail messages to supervisor notes, so that we could better respond to customer requests or complaints.”
- Bobbie Morton, IT Director, The T.

In early 2005, the T had a Nortel PBX-based telephone system and analog telephones across its three locations. With a newly created customer service initiative being launched, the new system needed to support improved internal and external communications, and as well as keep up with the T’s significant expansion and growth plans. Beyond such features and functionality, the T also wanted a solution that would provide it with an automated call center that included reporting features to log performance and other criteria.

“Our primary concern was that we needed a solution that would integrate all of our communications into one system — from calls to emails to voicemail messages.”
- Bobbie Morton, IT Director, The T.

The T chose ShoreTel for its Enterprise Contact Center feature set, ease of use and management, and because its open, distributed architecture ensured that the entire system would scale and grow as needed along with the T’s expansion plans. ShoreTel provided its Enterprise Contact Center solution, an integrated suite of applications based on ShoreTel’s unified communications platform, along with ShoreTel Voice Switches and ShoreTel IP Phones for The T’s three locations. Benefits include:

• Hundreds of dollars saved monthly in service provider charges and maintenance fees.
• Enterprise Contact Center leverages call center staff across all locations and ensures callers reach people, not voicemail.
• Enterprise Contact Center allows the T’s 30 agents to be located anywhere and  administrators to manage the suite of applications from a single user interface.
• Return on investment realized quickly in approximately one year, and total cost of ownership considerably reduced.
• Improved employee productivity with ShoreTel Call Manager’s intuitive desktop tools.
• Simplified management and reduced costs courtesy of ShoreTel Director. The browser-based interface allows IT staff to manage the entire system from anywhere on the network.

“The ShoreTel system is easy to learn and use. Everything is so intuitive.”
- Patrick Bixler, Network Administrator, The T.