City of San Luis Obispo

The city of San Luis Obispois is among California's oldest and most influential communities, and continues to welcome visitors, students and new residents eager to explore the recreational, educational and cultural opportunities in California’s Central Coast hub. To support the superb quality of life in this scenic area, the city takes forwardlooking strategy to providing modern services. These services are delivered on a modern technology infrastructure, which boasts a fiber optic network, installed jointly in an innovative partnership with Cal Poly. As part of that progressive strategy, San Luis Obispo city government relies on a ShoreTel IP phone system to keep city communications flowing smoothly. 

“ShoreTel’s reliability and flexibility means that communication just happens – when, where and how it needs to. Thanks to ShoreTel, every part of city government can focus on serving the public and take the phone system for granted.” 
— Steve Schmidt, Information Technology Manager, San Luis Obispo.

Prior to the ShoreTel deployment, city management was becoming increasingly frustrated with the city’s 10-year old Centrex/ISDN system. The system was complex to manage and use, required equipment that was difficult to repair or replace, and often dropped calls while transferring them. All in all, the system was reaching its end of life and not supporting latest initiatives for improving customer service, streamlining internal communications, increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs. Clearly San Luis Obispo needed a phone system that matched the city’s forward-looking agenda.

“It was easy to see that the ShoreTel Unified Communications (UC) system was simple to support and had a low cost of ownership. The system met all our requirements and the price was very competitive. The bottom line was that ShoreTel offered the most value for the money.”
— Steve Schmidt, Information Technology Manager, San Luis Obispo.

Following a recommendation from Gartner to switch to a voice-over-IP phone system, San Luis Obispo evaluated systems from a long list of both traditional and IP PBX suppliers. After talking with several customer references and attending a demonstration, ShoreTel beat Mitel on both price and ease of use.

Benefits include:

• Rapid return on investment due to ShoreTel’s simplicity and ease of management that reduces effort, and lets San Luis Obispo’s phone system be managed by internal IT staff.
• San Luis Obispo staff can add and move extensions quickly and easily, saving valuable time and increasing city responsiveness to the needs of end users.
• ShoreTel’s distributed architecture delivers exceptional reliability to help ensure every call is answered promptly and by the right person.
• ShoreTel’s highly configurable call handling modes help eliminate phone tag, while pre-screening features helps improve service for callers.

“When we first proposed the ShoreTel system, we projected about a four-year ROI. However, we’re saving so much on our phone bill, the ROI is even better than we anticipated—current figures indicate about three years. ShoreTel’s reliability and flexibility means that communication just happens – when, where and how it needs to. Thanks to ShoreTel, every part of city government can focus on serving the public and take the phone system for granted.”

— Steve Schmidt, Information Technology Manager, San Luis Obispo.