Improve Productivity & Cost Efficiency

The Arlington (Texas) Chamber of Commerce serves as a major catalyst for economic development and a strong advocate for business. As a public symbol of the city's business vitality, the Chamber saw that adopting leading edge technology was the key to positively positioning the city in the minds of members and other businesses. In particular, the Chamber sought to upgrade its telephony and communications systems to enhance staff efficiency and reduce system management costs. NEC installed the UNIVERGE 360 communications framework, UNIVERGE SV8100 Communications Server and UCB (UC for Business), which provided unified communications services such as presence and unified messaging. This integrated solution enabled the Chamber to reduce communication costs, increase employee productivity, provide better service and foster a more collaborative working environment with the business community. Randy Paine, Arlington Chamber of Commerce IT Manager, puts it this way: “We wanted to have the work-process and productivity enhancements that unified communications services, for example, presence and unified messaging, could bring to our employees. Thanks to the NEC solution, we get more done and are able to provide better service. Overall, the solution has paid for itself in the first six months.”

NEC UC for Business enables Allison Kinkel, Arlington Chamber receptionist, to be more effective when answering the phone. Says Kinkel, “If the person they want is out, I use UC for Business's presence function and look at the employee's status which is integrated with our Microsoft® Executive Insight calendaring.” Paine comments: “By hovering over the person's name, Allison can see where the person is and the scheduled return time. She can speak with authority now, and that makes a much better impression on callers and helps them estimate when they might receive a callback. That advance over the old method of passively taking messages is priceless.”

When John Weist, the director of the Arlington Chamber's Center for Government relations is in Austin attending the state legislature, he can now forward calls to his cell phone or he can use UC for Business's unified messaging and receive his voice messages on his laptop's Outlook inbox. “Before we had this NEC solution,” says Weist, “my only option was to forward messages to my administrative assistant which often delayed action on important issues. Now I can be far more responsive and effective thanks to our NEC communications solution.”

Arlington Chamber continues to evolve and develop its services, and its UNIVERGE solutions continue to unify its business communications.

Gemeente Cranendonck is a municipality in the southern Netherlands with a population of about 20,000. The city needed to optimize the effectiveness of civil servants while improving responsiveness to citizens and raising the level of services. And at the same time, it was essential to cut costs. To meet this challenge, NEC deployed its UNIVERGE SV8300 IP communication platform, which supports a mix of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), wireless, fixed and PC-based communication devices to connect 160 IP terminals at six locations. Cranendonck's 140 civil servants now use Business ConneCT Employee, NEC Unified Communications suite, to manage all their communications, allowing them to work more efficiently. Communication is enhanced by chat and texting functions, as well as a central directory and integrated voicemail. The presence functionality means that employees can see if a colleague is available first before phoning them, saving time on wasted calls and endless games of phone tag. More importantly, when an external call comes in, it can be routed immediately to the right person – if one employee isn't available, then the call can be transferred instead to someone else capable of dealing with the query. The city also uses NEC Business ConneCT Operator, which incorporates a powerful and flexible interactive voice response module, to quickly and efficiently connect citizens to the department or person that can provide the most suitable answer to an enquiry.

Local residents no longer experience the frustration of having to leave messages or phone back later, and the council wastes less time locating the appropriate person or returning calls – the problem is dealt with first time.

UC helps local authorities by integrating different methods of communications (landline phones, mobile phones, voice mail, conferencing, instant messaging) so that users can easily make contact with the person they are looking for – so if a person doesn't answer their landline, for example, the call transfers seamlessly to the mobile phone. For CIOs, it makes management much simpler – rather than deal with several different methods of communication, they can manage all communications from a single point, while keeping control of escalating mobile costs (because mobiles are integrated into the UC system, calls to a mobile cost the same as calls to a landline). It's also easy to scale a UC system to cope with more or fewer users, as required.