The Highland Council, the UK’s largest local authority by area, has seen a major communications transformation thanks to Daisy, part of the Wavenet Group.

The major infrastructure upgrade modernised 5,000 lines across schools, businesses, and two contact centres with a RingCentral cloud-based unified communications solution.

The enhanced system is set to significantly improve the reliability and efficiency of essential services, ensuring that 100% of emergency calls related to health and social care, housing, roads, and public buildings are now answered.

The Council’s legacy telecoms system previously powered 400 sites across the region, including 200 schools, and relied on traditional phone lines for residents and businesses to contact council services.

This limited contact centre call capacity to just 30 at a time and led to poor call quality, busy signals, and a substandard customer experience. The upcoming PSTN (public switch telephone network)  switch-off also provided a deadline for the council to upgrade its legacy system.

Working closely with Highland Council and RingCentral, Daisy implemented RingEX, a cloud-based infrastructure solution to consolidate phone lines and communication tools. Highland Council has since increased call capacity while eliminating long wait times, as well as streamlining operational efficiency and gaining greater insight into key metrics such as call abandon rates.

The new solution also provides additional support for remote council workers, while boosting security compliance.

“We have a huge project team, and this is by far the biggest project. 5,000 users and 2 contact centres all up and running in less than a year is incredible,” David Johnstone, ICT technical operations at The Highland Council, said.

“It isn’t just the configuration and the deployment; it is also the adoption of the end users. We have gone from not having a solution to now having a great one for all our people who are using it well, every day. Our work processes have been optimised and the senior management team is very happy with the capabilities. We would recommend Daisy and the solution wholeheartedly.”

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Kelly MacKay, customer & registration services at The Highland Council added: “This solution has been game-changing. As a Contact Manager, I want to see the full picture of the day with engaging dashboards without having to drill into the data.

“I can quickly glance and make decisions. Call quality is no longer an issue, and reporting and drilling into insightful data is incredibly valuable. Having worked in the service centre since 2006 and experienced many call handling technologies and CRM systems, this one stands out as exceptional compared to the others.”

“As a trusted partner of Highland Council and RingCentral, we’re proud to deliver a solution that meets current demands as well as providing a future-proof communications infrastructure for local businesses and residents. The successful implementation of RingEX has elevated collaboration and allowed for better operational control to support a smooth employee experience,” said Lee Hunwick, head of UC&C at Wavenet.