From binge bags to unified communications: How the public sector is transforming engagement

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Sometimes people don’t know what they want to read, but they know they want to read something, and preferably something they like.

For Casey Cardinia Libraries, a network of public facilities made up of eight libraries in Melbourne’s South-East, COVID created an opportunity to reinvent not only how it delivered services to its 135,000 active members, but also the way it communicated with those members.

The ‘what to read’ conundrum came into its own during the pandemic, when CCL staff developed the idea of ‘binge bags.’ With the bags, CCL staffers choose books, which fit in with the member’s interests, from the collection and then have it delivered to the member’s homes.

So far, says Daniel Lewis, CCL’s general manager, digital operations, the Binge Bag program has made over 12,000 home deliveries, performed free thanks to an agreement with Australia Post and community sponsors.

Those books, cumulatively, have weighed over 40,000 kilos or, as Lewis says, the equivalent of 1580 wombats.

The Binge Bags were made possible by the introduction of a new unified communications system provided by RingCentral which created both an inbound and outbound staff call centre, with staff members working from home.

“Early on in COVID we identified we really needed to engage with a community that was rapidly becoming disconnected,” Lewis says.

Libraries are a trusted source of information and play a role in helping people digest and understand that information, so a call centre was a must. CCL’s previous infrastructure was purely physical, whereas the new RingCentral set up is cloud-based.

All CCL had to do was ensure its call centre staff had a device capable of connecting to the internet, and within a week of COVID hitting, the library system was able to get everyone working from home.

Innovating using the cloud

CCL then started to examine the additional services it could provide to community members, which lead to the call-centre staff phoning members and doing welfare checks. “We would just call and see if there was anything we could do, particularly for those with young families or from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds,” Lewis says. “Some people really benefited from just being able to have a chat.”

The City of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, in Western Australia, also benefited in term of customer engagement from its move from a physical phone system to a cloud-based one, says Alyce Spokes, ICT manager for the City.

Existing limitations of its phone system meant it needed a reboot every single night to keep it working, which posed challenges for a public sector organisation servicing a landmass roughly the size of Iceland.

The old system was so compromised some calls between sites needed to be made externally.

“We wanted the ability to easily configure the IVR to give our ratepayers a better customer experience, and for all our sites to be on the same internal platform so that anyone who rang in on one of our numbers could use the IVR to be transferred to the right spot,” says Spokes.

Covering such a massive area means staff are often out in the field and not behind desks, but the old way of transferring calls to mobiles didn’t provide any visibility on what was coming through, nor did it necessarily make it easier to contact someone. Just because they had a mobile didn’t mean it was in range or switched on.

To combat this problem, staff phones were integrated with Microsoft Teams and a RingCentral app was downloaded onto the device, enabling it to operate as a full company phone.

There are concrete benefits to moving to the cloud-based system, Spokes says, particularly in the area of customer service.

“The ability for our staff to be contactable anywhere, the communication between all of our sites and being able to connect our ratepayers with the correct person have made a big difference in the experience ratepayers have when they are dealing with us.”

Along with the improvement in customer service, there are also advantages to integrating a staff member’s phone as a company device with a single number and incorporating Microsoft Teams, notes Naveed Husain, RingCentral’s VP for Worldwide Vertical Sales.

“If you’re using your personal phone to deal with a ratepayer, then it’s a risk for the staff member and the government,” he says.

“That’s because the number could be traced to a person and their address and that’s a physical risk.”

By enabling softphone technology on a personal device, the user is always protected, and their phone is integrated into the corporate system. Customer service is enhanced by making that person available, regardless of where they are (particularly relevant in a landmass the size of Western Australia), wherever they happen to be.

Binge Bags might be a long way from the remote community of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. But the problems and solutions are just the same: flexibility, reliability and cloud-based telephony to improve the wellbeing of customers.