London Borough of Hounslow creates closer community with 8x8

The Challenge: Outdated phone system impeded an ambitious strategy

How do you empower people to have a strong connection with each other and the place where they live? The London Borough of Hounslow answers that question in its One Hounslow approach, a multifaceted strategy to support a happier, healthier community.

One Hounslow addresses ways to improve the employee and resident experience. How to support that goal with technology is the job of Mark Lumley, Director of Digital and IT for the Hounslow London Borough Council.

“The telephony system was really old and large pieces of it were no longer supported,” Lumley recalls. “Keeping it running caused a lot of sleepless nights for my IT team, and it certainly wasn’t delivering modern capabilities or resilient service across the organization.”

The most notable problem areas were the contact centers where residents access borough services. The legacy system lacked the features and integrations the borough required to create consistently excellent experiences.

“We needed a change from a support and IT viewpoint,” Lumley says. “But also, in terms of our customer service strategy, we needed to do things differently for our residents, as well.”

The Solution: 8x8 Work and 8x8 Contact Center

In its digital strategy, the IT team reviewed all access channels and ways in which the borough communicates internally and with residents. One requirement is for all future technology to be cloud based and able to provide the reliability the borough’s residents expect.

Microsoft Teams had become a central pillar of collaboration during the pandemic. Now, with employees mostly working remotely, the borough depends on it. Integrating Microsoft Teams with the new phone system was mandatory.

Lumley knew 8x8 was well respected across local government in London. So, he had confidence that the 8x8 cloud-based platform would be the right solution.

8x8 offers a single platform for contact center and unified communications with a 99.999% uptime promise. With 8x8, the borough could unify customer engagement, communication and collaboration onto one dependable cloud platform.

The Results: Strong community, seamless collaboration

“8x8’s feature-rich platform lets us really improve the services that we deliver to our community,” Lumley says.

The Digital and IT Support desk was the first to switch to 8x8. The other contact centers, for borough services ranging from recycling collection to marriage certificates, quickly followed.

“8x8 has given us a really modern, robust, richly featured system that enables us to deliver those services and bring the community together,” Lumley says.

For residents, 8x8 makes it easier to call and access community services. And 8x8 analytics provide managers with insights that shape future services and programs.

For employees, collaboration is streamlined with 8x8, made even more seamless with the Microsoft Teams integration. 8x8’s intuitive interface makes training unnecessary. And everyone, from office staff to contact center agents, has at their fingertips the tools they need to better serve their community.

“The One Hounslow approach is really an effort to change how we do things for our residents and employees,” Lumley says. “8x8 is an important part of our transformation. It’s the first step in our journey.”