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The IT department at the Legal Services Society (LSS) in British Columbia faced a classic challenge - an aging telephone system that had reached its capacity to support its call center activities. LSS had to find better ways to manage its telephone advice and application services.

The answer turned out to be an IP phone solution from AltiGen, installed and deployed by Optinet Systems, Inc. of Vancouver. The solution not only gave LSS immediate relief from phone administration that had required extensive IT oversight, but LSS also gained new features that will allow the society to develop strategies around staffing, scheduling, and call management to improve overall efficiency. In addition, the system offers the potential for future service developments such as expanding call center capabilities.

LSS settled on the AltiGen solution “because the price was right and the features and functions were just what we were looking for,” says David Mathews, supervisor of Computer Services at LSS.

While the former phone system met most of LSS’s needs, it was very difficult and costly to make any changes to the system. Either the LSS IT staff was summoned to the task, or LSS had to
pay the service provider to make the changes.

COMPLETE EASE OF ADMINISTRATION
By contrast today, any and all changes to the AltiGen IP phone system are made by LSS staff, with the majority made by the users themselves rather than the IT staff. Mathews says a new“junior-level help desk staff person” became proficient in handling many changes on her own with very little training - and without having to bother the IT staff.

The actual installation of the system and cutover from the old to the new “went very smoothly,” Mathews says. Working with just one IT person from LSS, Optinet ported all the major existing phone functions to the AltiGen solution in one week. Included in this work was a porting of all multilingual voice prompts from the old system, which meant LSS didn’t have to pay interpreters and foreign language specialists to re-record the prompts, notes Suzanne Sherrod, president of Optinet.

“We just unplugged the old system and we were up and running on the AltiGen system,” Mathews recalls. “We had allowed some six weeks to field what we thought would be many support calls about the system. In fact, we dealt with all of them in less than three weeks.” The initial deployment included some 200 phones.

While LSS is only starting to scratch the surface of the new features of the AltiGen system, the lawyers are already using its embedded software to monitor call queue statistics and leverage caller ID information. And most importantly to Mathews, his IT team now has more time to work on strategic projects instead of worrying about the phone system.