The South Dublin County Council gains flexibility through innovation

The South Dublin County Council covers a large geographical area of approximately 223 km2 and supports almost 280 000 people. In 2019 the Council signed the Declaration on Public Service Innovation, which states that to better serve its people, the Irish Public Service needs to be highly innovative. Following through on this promise, the Council decided to digitalize its telephony system to offer users a more flexible way of working.

The backdrop

The Council had a telephony infrastructure supporting over 1,000 users, across the main site and the outlying libraries managed by the Council. In addition to this, the Council’s CustomerCare department handled all incoming calls via a multi-media queue-based contact center to handle public calls. The economic benefits, ease of handling, and increased flexibility that the cloud offers convinced the Council to move to a Microsoft O365 environment.

The project

Our Partner VEI Global was put in charge of migrating the Council to Microsoft Teams and finding a compatible contact center solution. At the heart of the project was the need to provide a seamless, consistent, and reliable platform to support a fully flexible working arrangement for all employees and to continue to provide an efficient customer care center solution to handle all calls from the public.

VEI Global’s approach to the Council’s strategy was to integrate the existing technology into MS O365 as a short-term measure. This would make the best use of the investment already made by the Council. Staff would continue to use technology that they were familiar with, therefore minimizing any disruption to customers and staff alike. This would allow the Council to migrate to the MS Teams environment at a controlled and managed pace.

In late 2021, The Council working with VEI Global made the decision to move away from the existing contact center to Luware Nimbus. This made it possible to fully integrate the contact center into Microsoft Teams and to further reduce IT infrastructure and complexity. 60 queues and an operator console were implemented and used as the Council’s new contact center platform. Because of the cloud-native nature of Luware Nimbus, the solution can grow with the Council’s changing needs.

The result

“Working with South Dublin County Council, we have rolled out a cutting edge solution that is fully integrated with the Microsoft Teams platform. We have enabled their employees to work better, smarter and more flexibly. In addition, we have scaled back their existing phone system, enhanced contact centre operations efficiencies and achieved cost savings, ” says Jane O’Doherty from VEI Global.

This reference case study was originally published by VEI Global and edited for brevity.