Portland Water District

The Portland Water District in Maine is a quasi-municipality providing water, wastewater, and environmental services to 11 Greater Portland communities. The organization’s 190 employees are dedicated to providing quality services to more than 190,000 people.

“We were impressed with ShoreTel because it met all our needs — ease of use and administration, flexible integration to other IT systems, customer self-service with IVR, budget, and portability.”
- Peter Cutrone, Director of Information Services, Portland Water District.

In late 2004, the water district was faced with an old Executone PBX system that had become obsolete and was costly and difficult to maintain. The district looked closely at solutions from Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, ShoreTel, and others over the course of three months. Priority was placed on disaster recovery capabilities and ease of use and management. The district also sought a system that offered an integrated voice response (IVR) system that would work with its Oracle database and permit customers to call in for automated information on their accounts.

“We also appreciate the ability of the system to record calls, especially calls regarding dangerous situations — the old system wouldn’t allow us to record calls.”
- Peter Cutrone, Director of Information Services, Portland Water District.

In addition to over 230 ShoreTel IP Phones selected to suit end-user needs, ShoreTel provided the Portland Water District with ShoreTel 120, 40, and T1 Voice Switches, and dedicated servers for voicemail, ShoreTel’s Enterprise Contact Center, and ShoreTel Director, the system’s browser-based management interface. Seamless integration with Microsoft^® Outlook^® provided integrated messaging, directory dialing, contact screen pop, and calendar integration. Other benefits include:

• Employees enjoy enhanced productivity with powerful unified messaging tools, including visual voicemail and desktop call control. Features like Follow Me Find Me allow employees to have calls track them down wherever they are.
• IVR capabilities free up customer service reps by providing automatic messages to update citizens about things like ongoing repair work and outage updates.
• System management costs are dramatically reduced, as the IT team can manage every site and feature from anywhere on the network through a browser-based interface.
• ShoreTel Workgroups increases operational efficiency, allowing the district to consolidate its calls to one number per workgroup.

“Changing a phone system is a major project because it affects everybody. This was one of the easiest IT projects we’ve ever done and people couldn’t be happier — we went from contract to full implementation in just four months. That’s incredible and it’s all due to ShoreTel.”
- Chad Davis, Network Administrator, Portland Water District.