Surrey County Council implements innovative telephony solution 

Surrey County Council (SCC) is pleased to announce the successful implementation of a cutting-edge telephone system, enhancing communication and streamlining processes for residents and staff. 

The new system will deliver an enhanced experience for residents in the county, with faster call handling times resulting in reduced waiting times. This feeds into the organisation’s strategic vision of No One Left Behind, striving to ensure that support is offered in a timely manner to those who need it most.  It will also bring a wide range of benefits following the end of the organisation’s existing telephony contract, increasing both flexibility and resilience for Surrey’s contact centre staff, aligning with Surrey’s hybrid working approach.  

The Microsoft Teams-based solution, delivered by digital transformation specialists FourNet, ensures uninterrupted service, even during emergencies or disruptions. The adoption of NICE’s CXone system empowers the contact centre with advanced capabilities.

The migration resulted from an ambitious project to consolidate phone lines across 130 locations in Surrey. Following a meticulous review to ensure a smooth transition, this work was successfully executed in a single day. The success of this owed much to whole council collaboration, planning ahead of the work and the efforts of SCC’s internal project team. This team worked over many months, providing huge amounts of information to ensure the project could be delivered and that the contract was well handled, alongside teams at FourNet, who helped to organise and execute this project. The result of this collaboration ensured a seamless switchover, with residents not experiencing inconvenience during this work.

Since the switchover was completed, SCC handled 1,300 calls on the first day, demonstrating the system’s robustness. Moving forward, SCC aims to leverage the system’s full capabilities for enhanced service delivery and a dedicated design team will explore further enhancements while maintaining the system’s reliability. 

The Council receives around 870,000 incoming calls per annum – of which around 550,000 incoming calls will be to users of the new Teams telephony system, and around 240,000 are to the Council’s contact centre. 

Liz Mills, Interim Director of Customer Digital & Change, commented on the project’s completion: “Our telephony upgrade ensures efficient communication, benefiting our community as well as our teams. As an organisation, we are committed to ensuring that no one is left behind and will continue to harness technology to better serve our residents. I am immensely proud of our colleagues’ efforts on the day and their endeavours in the months and weeks leading up to the transition. This robust groundwork ensured that the project was completed in a timely manner without causing undue disruption for our customers.”