Morristown Utility Systems

Morristown Utility Systems (MUS) provides water, power, and now FiberNet broadband cable services to nearly 13,000 customers within the municipal boundaries of the City of Morristown, TN. The utility’s decision to diversify its business by entering the home broadband market with entertainment and communication products and services was a wise one. However, the intensive assistance some customers need to establish and maintain these services has had a significant impact on the utility’s communication system.

“The volume of calls tripled, plus the length of calls went from an average of two minutes to more than 20 minutes, due to the complexity of the fiber to the home business.”
— Mike Fawbush, Information Systems Manager, MUS.

The old system had three independent PBXs in three separate sites, but calls could not be transferred to any one site in emergency situations. Since the city depends on the utility company for power and water, especially to provide city services during any type of emergency or outage, MUS needs a communications system that is highly flexible and reliable. Furthermore, given the small size of the utility’s IT staff, any new system would have to be easy to deploy, manage, and administer.

“The old system only offered automated call distribution, and agents had to notice the light on the phone to know that someone was on the line waiting. We were getting at least four or five complaints a day from frustrated residents unable to get through to a live person.”
— Mike Fawbush, Information Systems Manager, MUS.

Seeing that ShoreTel met all of their requirements for management ease, reliability, functionality, and flexibility — and at a much lower price point than the competition — MUS approved the purchase of a ShoreTel system. A number of ShoreTel 60 and 40 Voice Switches were installed across three sites: the main office which houses customer service, administration, payroll, accounting, and the general manager; the water filtration plant; and the telecom and power site. With three-digit dialing, calls between sites are simply and quickly transferred. The system also uses ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center and ShoreTel Call Manager applications to increase efficiency and boost collaboration. Other benefits include:

• ShoreTel’s ease of management has cut the time spent on phone system management down to minutes, freeing IT staff for revenue-generating projects.
• The redundancy of the ShoreTel distributed architecture assures that in the event of an outage during an emergency, the phones automatically switch over to an alternate site without disruption.
• The utility now receives fewer than five complaints every six months, and it is easy for staff to query the call data recording (CDR) information to investigate each case.
• The sophisticated features of ShoreTel Contact Center enable the utility to improve customer service and to scale as needed to handle increased call volumes.

"Having no previous PBX experience, the simplicity of the ShoreTel UC system allows me to manage it with ease and confidence."
— Chelsey Holt, Information Systems Specialist, MUS.