SWDC gets new phone system

South Waikato District Council is excited to announce that we are moving to a more advanced telecommunications system to improve customer service and experience. We will be transitioning to this new system from midday on Wednesday 23 May and the full transition will take about a week.

We anticipate this changeover will be seamless for our community, but there may be some brief outages.

"The change is the first phase of Council's improved customer focus strategy aimed to ensure that when you call us, you are put through to the right person easily, get the correct information and are able to tell us about your customer experience" said Andrew Robinson, Business Improvement Manager.

"We ask our community to be a little patient with us in the early days," continued Mr Robinson. "Staff have been trained on the new system, but it is drastically changed and there may be a few teething problems."

Council's phone system was outdated and in need of replacement. As part of the All of Government scheme*. Vodafone's Telecommunications as a Service (TaaS) proposal was the successful tender.

TaaS offers new and useful customer service based improvement features that will be utilised from the outset and going forward. Some of these features includes in queue public messaging that is useful for rubbish collection on a public holiday type of messages and single number reach which means that customers no longer phone a number, you phone a person and your call effectively 'hunts' for that person across several devices.

"The system will also provide for improvement in internal productivity with a video-conferencing for meetings, so staff from outer locations can join meetings via phone link, rather than needing to travel to one place," said Mr Robinson.

* The 'All of Government' Scheme is an all of government initiative that secures larger contracts for cost effective efficiencies across government and local government.

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