Delaware County

Delaware County improves its caller experience by 10x using RingEX

Region

Americas

Company size

400–4,999

Industry

Government

delcopa.gov

Products used

When our county and our constituents needed it most, RingEX performed flawlessly. And now, years later, it continues to perform flawlessly.

Jack Magee

Telecommunications Manager

The fourth most populous county in Pennsylvania

The government of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, provides a wide range of services for the county’s 575,000 residents–including courts, public transportation, health services, law enforcement, and emergency medical services.

Delaware County also owns and operates one of Pennsylvania’s longest-operating long-term-care facilities, the Fair Acres Geriatric Center, which has served the county’s residents for more than 200 years.

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A phone system unworthy of the county’s residents

Until 2020, all employees across the Delaware County Government’s offices and bureaus used a legacy, on-prem phone infrastructure to communicate internally and with the public.

Jack Magee, Telecommunications Manager for the Delaware County Government, explains that the outdated phone system has increasingly created challenges for both the county’s employees and their constituents.

“The legacy system is so old–we’re talking decades–that it fails somewhat regularly. Sometimes the ISDN lines go down when a storm hits, and other times some part of the infrastructure just breaks. And we often have trouble bringing phone service back up after something breaks because it’s difficult to find replacement parts.”

Even with the legacy system functioning, Jack adds, he’s heard frequent complaints from both employees and constituents. “People report problems with static on calls, not being able to hear the other person, and voices sounding crackly.”

Although the county already had a telecommunications upgrade on its roadmap, the 2020 lockdowns accelerated the search for a cloud phone solution. Jack began researching providers with the help of Delaware County’s trusted consulting partner, The Davinci Group.

“Davinci’s Stephen Benson was great at helping us narrow the field and find RingCentral, which more than any other company had all the tools we needed to achieve our communication objectives as an organization.”

Our county has many departments, each with different communication workflows and preferences. RingEX gives us the flexibility we need. Whether a department or employee wants a desk phone, softphone capability on their computer, or a mobile app, or all three under different circumstances, we can offer those capabilities to them.

Jack Magee

Telecommunications Manager

Staying connected to constituents through challenging times

As the lockdowns forced Delaware County’s employees to work remotely, Jack and his team began implementing RingEX first for constituent-facing teams. The cloud phone system, he says, exceeded the county’s expectations.

For months during COVID, we had one team handling 2,000 calls a day. There’s no way our old system would have supported that, not with everyone working remotely. But thanks to RingEX’s easy ability to update call queues and IVRs, and the fact that our employees could take those calls from home, that department served those constituents without a single telephony issue.

Jack Magee

Telecommunications Manager

Jack points out that RingEX also proved invaluable when Delaware County moved its Bureau of Elections to a new facility. Although the building had internet service, it did not yet have the wiring for telecommunications.

“We needed to set up the Bureau of Elections quickly at the new site, and our telecom carrier said they couldn’t even come close to meeting our deadline to equip the building with phone service. But that didn’t matter–because we easily spun up RingEX accounts for everyone within days.”

10x

call experience improvement since switching to RingEX

2,000

outage-free calls answered daily

weeks to implement RingEX for the county Bureau of Elections’ new location

Increasing visibility and accountability also serves constituents

Using the RingEX reporting and analytics dashboard, Jack points out, helps managers and supervisors in various county departments continually improve their teams’ operations and the caller experience.

“At one point, we received complaints that some constituents’ calls went unanswered,” Jack says. “Thankfully, the RingEX reporting lets us see everything–who’s answering which calls and how many, by the hour, the day, whatever we need. Our managers quickly figured out that most employees answered, say, 40 calls a day, but a few took five or so. Once everyone knew we monitored everything, and with a little coaching, we resolved those problems right away.”

Between the improvement in call quality, the stability of the RingEX system itself, and the new things we could now do with IVRs and queues to make it easier to get constituents to the right people, I’d say the move to RingEX has easily improved our caller experience by 10x.

Jack Magee

Telecommunications Manager

Improving employee accessibility and safety with Push to Talk

Jack points out that Delaware County gained even more value from RingEX when his team deployed Push to Talk–a radio-like feature that lets the RingEX mobile app serve as a walkie-talkie for direct voice messaging.

“We’ve found several great uses for Push to Talk,” Jack explains. “At our Fair Acres Geriatric Care facility, our maintenance and IT teams use it for quick and direct communications when they’re moving around the facilities. Our Health Department’s environmental health teams use it to stay connected while they’re out in the field. And our Sheriff’s Department uses Push to Talk for backup communications when deputies are in areas with weak or no radio signal.”

Working to empower all county employees with RingEX

As Jack explains, RingEX has more than delivered for Delaware County since his team began rolling it out to select teams in 2020.

“I don’t think you’ll find a bigger RingEX cheerleader than I am,” he says. “In my 40 years of telecom experience, I’ve worked with just about every system out there, and I’m extremely impressed with RingEX. Now I’m eager to get it deployed to the rest of our county government.”

We’ve migrated about half of the county’s 3,000 employees onto RingEX. But we’ve had so much success with RingEX, and our users across the organization are so vocal in singing its praises that we’re moving as quickly as we can to upgrade every Delaware County employee onto this great cloud phone system.

Jack Magee