Previous page:Hold the line, please
About a year-and-a-half ago, Halifax Regional Municipality decided to upgrade to VoIP as part of a massive expansion of its call centre.
"We were physically building a new location, going from a room to a building," recalls Daya Pillay, manager of e-commerce and Web services. "We had plans for 311 in the future, and as part of that process we brought together 911 and non-emergency calls into the same location."
One of the action items of this consolidation was to bring the region's call centre technology in-house, says Pillay. "In order to get some of the technology to drive our statistics and our customer service orientation, we thought we'd be best served by hosting our own IP switch and getting all those features we desired."
During the RFP process, a cost analysis was done and Halifax chose to go with VoIP. As part of its procurement practices, the municipality tends to lean towards the lowest bidder, explains Pillay. When the system went live, some critical decisions had to be made and the VoIP system was not ready.
"The project simply ceased to be." In the end, the "solution" was not implemented. "Part of the reason for this was that the vendor wasn't really experienced in VoIP technology."
Halifax remains on a hosted telco system and is pushing on with its plans for a consolidated call centre, building the back-end processes to support 311.
"We're using a single number, but we haven't yet resolved all our services," says Pillay. "We're still working on the business processes so the call centre will be not just a director of people to different information services, but will offer a full range of services."
A call to return
Janet Harris-Campbell, director of IT services for the City of Ottawa, notes that the approach to VoIP has evolved from two to three years ago. When the technology was still new, there was a great deal of hype around the possible features that VoIP applications might offer business, she says.
If an organization really looked at what a cost-recovery or a business-case approach might be, those features really wouldn't bring the return on investment for making the change, asserts Harris-Campbell.
As Toronto begins to implement 311, Davies concedes VoIP will most likely play some role. He's just not sure it will be immediate. "It makes sense," he admits, but "right now the real business use for it is a fuzzy notion."
"Some of those applications that come with VoIP will be convenient and add ease of use, but it's been harder for us to quantify the hard dollar savings," says Harris-Campbell.
"We need to sort the hype from a return on investment. We have to be responsible to tax-payers and show we've assessed the hard business value."
For IP trunking alone, Ottawa estimates savings of $1 million per year at the end of four years, but beyond the convergence of data and voice, the city hopes to learn what more the technology can do to help business.
Continued:Dial this number first
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