Hidalgo County Texas

Located in Southern Texas and with a population close to 750,000, Hidalgo County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation and covers almost 1,600 square miles. It’s also one of the poorest, challenging county leadership to provide an increasing number of excellent public services despite shrinking budgets. County government is divided into four precincts, overseeing 20 cities and employing more than 2,800 government workers.

“Operators did not know the phone numbers for transferring callers. So if someone dialed the wrong department looking for license plate information, whoever answered the phone would not know where to transfer the call. This resulted in a lot of complaints from residents who felt they were getting the runaround.”
- Renán Ramirez, Chief Information Officer, Hidalgo County.

The County sought to replace its existing phone system, which cost about $900,000 a year and did not provide voicemail, transfer capabilities, or a central directory of staff telephone numbers. Taking pride in its communications policy of accessibility and responsiveness, the county’s priority was to identify and deploy a platform that improved connectivity, streamlined collaboration, and reduced expenditures.

“Our telephone engineer suggested we take a look at the ShoreTel Unified Communications (UC) system, since it did not require specially certified experts to manage.”
- Renán Ramirez, Chief Information Officer, Hidalgo County.

Confident that the simplified management of the ShoreTel system would help to reduce skyrocketing phone costs, Hidalgo County began with an implementation of 800 ShoreTel IP 560 Phones, expanding to more than 1,500 phones. About 100 ShoreTel Voice Switches and four voicemail servers rounded out the hardware component. Other benefits include:

• Massive cost savings: from $900,000 a year down to about $400,000.
• IT staff can manage the system from anywhere on the network using the browser-based interface of ShoreTel Director, saving money and time. Adds, changes, and moves can be made nearly in the click of a button.
• Feature-rich capabilities of ShoreTel Call Manager, including customizable call handling modes and workgroups, help ensure all citizens’ calls are answered promptly.
• Built-in redundancy and reliability keep communications running in an emergency — an essential in this hurricane-prone region.

“The equipment arrived and was deployed very quickly — within a month it felt as though we had been running it for years.”
- Renán Ramirez, Chief Information Officer, Hidalgo County.