Case Study: 211 Tampa Bay Cares, Inc.

Customer Profile:
2-1-1 Tampa Bay Cares, Inc. is an information and referral agency located in Clearwater Florida serving Pinellas, Hernando and Citrus cou nties. 2-1-1 Tampa Bay Cares, Inc. (211TBC) handles over 70,000 calls per year answering questions and providing information about rental assistance, mental health care, domestic abuse, military families support, hurricane information, suicide and 911 crisis calls, tutoring and mentoring programs for kids, and much more.

Serving such a large and diverse population of over 1.4 million residents, (211TBC) needed a phone system and call center that would accommodate their growing community and program offerings.

Telephony Challenge:
In 2004, the Executive Director Micki Thompson faced an operational challenge to provide a high level of service to the community while controlling the costs associated with operating a call center.  211TBC had been using a Central Office hosted system from Verizon that was not meeting their needs in a variety of ways.  Some of the issues they were dealing with were:

• Lack of caller ID and DNIS routing information
• Limited Reporting statistics and flexible data options
• Portability of the solution in the event of an outage or disaster
• Limited scalability
• Lack of  flexibility
• Multiple disparate systems to provide call center and Community Voice Mail  (CVM) functions
• Limited call handling and queue options

NETsystems Solution:
211TBC issued a detailed RFP for their call center that would satisfy all their technical and functional requirements.  NETsystems Communications responded with a proposal and was ultimately selected to install an Altigen Communications Contact Manager Solution.  This solution would reside in the Largo office (since relocated to Clearwater to be in a safer hurricane non-evacuation zone.) 

One of the driving requirements for the selection of the Altigen system according to Micki Thompson is “the biggest advantage of the Altigen solution is cost.  Altigen is a very cost effective solution that enables our 2-1-1 call center to have just as many capabilities and disaster recovery solutions as many of our call center counterparts. “

The system based on an Altioffice-3 chassis with 6 PRI's or 138 voice channels, features redundant RAID drives and power supplies to provide maximum uptime.  With 25 call center agent seats and 2 supervisors 211TBC, has the ability to listen, coach, and monitor calls to ensure that accurate data is being provided.  Further, full time call recording allows for all calls to be reviewed ensuring that the agency objectives and agent training is being met, as well as funding source requirements are being adhered to. 

As an additional community service 211TBC also provides over 1000 community voicemail boxes to the homeless and at risk population.   This allows the homeless to receive a private phone number and voicemail that can be personalized, eliminating the stigma and difficulty of not having a way of being reached for a job or a medical appointment. Deployed in many communities nationwide, studies have shown that homeless citizens can obtain housing, jobs, and medical care in a much quicker fashion when utilizing the CVM service.  The benefit to the community is a reduction in crime and police expense and a happier and safer community at large.

Benefits:

• Information mailboxes allow for commonly asked information to be prerecorded, allowing the call center agents to give personalized service to more callers.  In times of natural disasters this can prove invaluable in proving shelter and storm information and redirect the load of calls from emergency service personnel
• Reporting provides detailed analysis of call trends and service thresholds
• Flexible IP phones provides easy relocation to an emergency shelter or telecommuter agents by using DSL or Cable connections
• AltiGen's Mobile Extension feature allows any phone including a cell phone or analog home phone to be an extension or agent off the switch allowing for all the normal features of a call center agent. 

This is been used by staff who had to work from home for family reasons and emergencies, as well as a key component of the 211TBC disaster recovery plan.

Thompson goes on to say “As a non-profit agency, funding is always a challenge.  The Altigen system was able to give us the most robust system at a reasonable cost.  Many large call centers utilize more expensive ACD systems but with our Altigen system we look like we are just as large and sophisticated as many large for-profit call centers.  In fact, there are some functions that we can do that some of our local partners are unable to provide particularly in disaster recovery.”

Feedback and Results:
The second phase of the implementation utilized a second redundant Altigen system in the carriers secure and hardened Co-location facility in Orlando to provide circuit and equipment redundancy.  According to Micki Thompson “Altigen saves the day on many occasions for our agency.  With our disaster recovery solution, 2-1-1 TBC is able to remain in operation during power outages during our usual summer storms here in Florida as well as during hurricanes and other emergencies.   It's saved the day when a midnight call center rep has an emergency and can't come into work; one of our staff can log on remotely and answer from their home without coming in to the building in the middle of the night.  Another situation was during our recent move.  We were actually able to be in both our old location and our new location answe ring lines.  The transition was seamless and there was no need for downtime.  The 2-1-1 hotline never closed!”

When the PRI voice circuits go down due to a circuit or hardware problem, or even routine maintenance the calls automatically forward to the Colo and route to cell phones and IP phones till the problem is resolved.  In October 2007, a flood in a carrier equipment room from a broken cooling pipe resulted in a 14 hour outage to over 2700 businesses in the Tampa area.  But 211TBC continued to answer calls and provide help and answers to their c ommunity for the entire day.

Micki Thompson said, “NETsystems is the most customer focused and creative vendor we have ever worked with.  I can honestly say that without Darrell Murray and his team at Net Systems, we would not be where we are today.  Because of their willingness to think outside the box, 2-1-1 TBC has elevated our ability to meet the needs of our community as well as assisted our organization in ob taining addition contracts and funding because of our ability to add additional services quickly and easily.  We can honestly attribute a great deal of our recent success to Darrell Murray and his creative telecommunications solutions!”