CBTS, a subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell, was facing several challenges in its operations. The company was struggling with time-to-market issues, as new features and enhancements were only being delivered once or twice a year. This slow pace was causing them to lag behind their competitors. Additionally, every time CBTS introduced a new version of their client software, they also needed to update the branding, which was a labor-intensive process that further delayed the delivery of the latest features to customers. CBTS also lacked the internal expertise to drive mobile innovation, which was a vital aspect of communications. Lastly, the company needed to increase operational efficiencies to free up their engineering and operational teams’ time to work on more strategic projects.

The university relied on an aging PBX network to serve its medical center and the academic side of its operations. The 30-year-old equipment was no longer supported by the manufacturer and lacked the features and scalability needed to support future growth. Parts procurement had become problematic, maintenance costs were soaring, and it was clear an immediate change was needed.

Montgomery College, one of the nation’s largest and most highly regarded community colleges, faced several communication challenges. Team members working remotely across multiple campuses and course delivery sites needed access to a consistent telecommunications infrastructure. The tech-savvy student body expected to communicate and collaborate from any location over any device. The college's premise-based communications platform was comprised of disparate platforms that didn’t easily integrate with other strategic cloud investments. Officials were determined to find a way to transform communications and build a “connected campus”— able to support administrators, faculty and students wherever they work or study.

The National Laboratory was supported by a large telco-type switch built on 1980s-vintage TDM technology. The system took up an entire floor of an office building and had twice the capacity the Lab actually needed. It also required a team of about 20 engineers just to provide maintenance. The Lab’s IT team looked for a more modern and cost-effective approach to communications that could transition the campus from TDM to voice over IP, leveraging the Lab’s own supercomputing network. The solution would need to support employees and contractors campus-wide, including critical call center and help desk teams. It also would need to interoperate seamlessly with various network components and applications the Lab already owned — many of them home-grown.

MISS DIG System, Inc. was using an outdated call center telephone system for 10 years, which prevented them from achieving their vision of being a more agile organization. The old system supported taking notifications only through telephone calls. MISS DIG 811 had two 800 numbers, each with its own team of NSRs with different scripts and processes. This meant that callers were getting an inconsistent experience based on the number they dialed. With the old system, every caller was randomly sent to whomever was available to take the call at the time, regardless of the caller’s or NSR’s experience, role, or personality. Often callers dialed the wrong number or made the wrong interactive voice response (IVR) selections, and ended up in the wrong department. When these calls were transferred, there was no way to know whether the recipient was available to answer the call or whether the caller would end up in another queue or voicemail. Another challenge was the inability to integrate the old call recording system with the MISS Dig 811 CRM, Newtin, which made it extremely difficult to associate inbound notifications with call recordings. This integration was an important requirement, as a new law requires MISS DIG 811 to maintain all inbound notifications for six years. MISS DIG 811 personnel spent hours trying to match recordings with notification tickets, wasting valuable time and energy that could have been spent serving customers. The old system tracked all callers in the same way, without making a distinction between first-time residential callers needing education and repeat callers. As a result, MISS DIG 811 did not have the data to back up its intuition that first-time callers were inflating its time-on-call metrics.

The agency administrative team had been relying on 250 standalone phone systems to support remotely based personnel. However, the aging equipment had become unreliable and lacked modern-day features. Each office had its own unique dialing plan, billing process, support model, and contract, creating complex administrative challenges. The administrators were looking for a better way to support the team and to provide the advanced communications and collaboration tools needed to further the agency’s mission.