Someone on hold to report a missed collection doesn't hang up and forget. They call back. Then they email. Then they contact their councillor. One unanswered enquiry becomes four contacts and a complaint. Here is what we hear most often when we sit down with a local authority.
Residents choose how they get in touch: a phone call, a WhatsApp at 10pm, an SMS, an email. Meeting them where they are means being open on every one of those channels, with the same answer and the same record behind each. Most councils still run a phone queue that closes at five, and every contact it misses comes back as two more.
Owning out-of-support phone equipment is a risk in itself: no patches, scarce spare parts and a physical single point of failure, while staff work across depots, offices and home. Your IT team should keep control of the decisions, not spend its time keeping ageing hardware alive. And a voice-only platform can route and report on calls, but it can’t do email, SMS, WhatsApp or AI.
When it’s minus 10 at night and someone rings the homeless line, that call has to be answered and reach the right officer. A missed call there doesn’t stay a service issue; it becomes a question for elected members. Staying available around the clock depends on two things: infrastructure that stays up, and channels people can actually reach you on.
A council isn’t one building. It’s a head office, dozens of area offices, libraries, depots and fire stations, and the temporary cabin set up for a road project at the far end of the county. Each needs secure, reliable connectivity, over fibre, wireless, 5G or satellite, and some start with none at all.
Phone, WhatsApp, SMS, web chat or email: residents pick the channel, and every one lands in one queue with the same answers and records behind it. Voice AI Agents complete routine requests end to end, so your teams spend their time on the cases that need them.
Every channel
WhatsApp, SMS, web chat and email, giving the same answers and writing to the same records as the phone.
Missed bins, council tax balances, parking permits and planning status, answered and completed 24/7 without reaching an agent.
Residents are verified before they reach your team, so the conversation starts at the issue.
Calls, chats and messages routed to the right team, with the full history attached.
Replace out-of-support phone equipment with a cloud platform we run on our own network. Your IT team keeps the decisions on change, security and configuration; the ageing hardware, patching and single points of failure go. Because the new platform handles every channel and AI, modernising the infrastructure is also how you meet residents where they are.
No servers to host, patch or replace, and no reliance on parts that are no longer made. One contract, one support desk for platform, numbers, and lines.
Cloud platforms with resilience built in, running on a network with no downtime in 2025 and 2026 to date.
Desk handsets in depots, a headset and desktop app in the office, Zoom or Microsoft Teams at home. One platform behind all of them.
Housing and homelessness is where availability is tested: the call at 2am, in minus 10, from someone with nowhere to go. Resilient infrastructure keeps the line up, every channel keeps it reachable, and live reporting shows managers what’s happening while they can still act.
Housing and homelessness
Calls and messages after closing time answered and routed to the on-call team, not left on voicemail.
Calls waiting, wait times and abandoned calls for the housing and homeless line, on a dashboard, as it happens.
Emergency accommodation calls go to the front of the queue and to the right officer, day or night.
Historical reports on volumes, answer rates and response times by service, ready for elected members and audit.
From head office to the fire station to the cabin on a road project, we design, build and run secure networks that scale across every type of site a council has. Fibre where it’s available; wireless, 5G or satellite where it isn’t, all managed as one network.
Fibre, wireless, 5G, satellite and radio line-of-sight links, matched to each location rather than one design forced on all of them.
Managed SD-WAN and MPLS with security built in, plus SIP fraud protection and session border controllers for your lines and numbers.
An always-on, self-healing network, continuously monitored, with issues found and fixed before residents notice.
Pop-up, emergency and remote locations connected quickly, even where there’s no connectivity today, with numbers that follow your people.
One platform connecting contact centre advisors, back-office departments, and field-based teams, rather than the patchwork of phone systems most authorities have inherited service by service and site by site.
Contact centre platforms built for the reality of council demand: waste, housing, planning, revenues and benefits all arriving at once, across phone, WhatsApp, SMS, email and web chat, in one queue instead of five.
