Case Study

The Problem

Stanislaus County had an urgent need for a 100-agent call center to handle overflow calls to the county hotlines regarding COVID-19. The new call center was to be deployed in what is known as Harvest Hall, which has 3 separate areas large enough to accommodate all of the agents and still allow them to maintain social distance. The county was asking for this on a Tuesday and needed the call center to be fully operational by the following Monday.

The Challenge

To spin up a new call center in a new location like this first requires cabling infrastructure to be in place, such as connectivity from each of the rooms back to the County data center. The County had to decide how temporary this cabling would be and also how much expense was adequate to make sure the cabling was both well-implemented and capable of maintaining integrity in an environment where it would be exposed to foot traffic. 

The short timeline—a challenge itself—created other challenges like acquiring phones, licensing, and networking equipment for all phones and computers (which could normally take 2-3 weeks). The phones would also need to be configured.

The Solution

On the first day of engagement, we immediately began working parallel on multiple fronts to get ahead of the implementation curve. Due to our long history of providing and supporting solutions for Stanislaus County, we had a high level of trust with their organization. This allowed us to get started while still finalizing a scope of work and bill of materials. 

Our engineering team was able to start building a new contact center to handle this number of agents, configuring the phones, and building the scripts. We were able to offer up several used Cisco switches that were available in our inventory. Although end-of-life, they were perfect for this solution given the temporary nature of the network and the fast turnaround required. Licensing was a non-issue because Cisco was allowing temporary licensing to be issued for call centers due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our structured cabling team visited the site to determine the necessary parts and was able to pull everything from inventory. Within 2 days, the cabling infrastructure was in place. 

The county was able to pull phones from their used inventory, and we re-configured them for this new environment and placed them on desks. The final component was routing all 211 calls through the system to this call center so that agents could answer the flood of new calls. 

Once the project was completed, we received a call from Paul Gibson, CIO of Stanislaus County. He wanted to let us know what a great job our team was doing and that they couldn’t have done this without our partnership. We love helping our clients meet their challenges and accomplish their goals.