Avaya Helps Leon County Streamline, Centralize, and Flexibly Create New Experiences

The county’s IT team is unique in that it serves not just these offices, led by the Board of County Commissioners, but also governmental partners including the Sheriff, Court Administration, Clerk of Courts, Supervisor of Elections, State Attorney, Public Defender, Tax Collector, and Property Appraiser. Leon County also supports the joint county-city Consolidated Dispatch Agency, which fields calls for the Leon County Sheriff, Tallahassee Police, Tallahassee Fire Department, and County Emergency Medical Services as well as the Emergency Operations Center.

For Michelle Taylor, CIO at Leon County Government, this creates a wide- ranging set of challenges, from 24x7 support for governmental partners to scalable communications for planned and unexpected spikes in call volume.

Each constitutional office has its own smaller IT resources for department-specific application support, while Taylor and her team provide consolidated enterprise services such as network infrastructure, cloud computing, and the desktop application suite, including email, Internet, and telephony services.

Agility has emerged as the number one need for the government sector which was accelerated by COVID-19. To become more adaptive and responsive, government institutions need flexible solutions that allow them to deploy “on the fly” to meet quick and changing circumstances. For Leon County, this meant rapid CX innovation, enabling citizens to quickly get the answers they need to work with the county’s emergency operations center (EOC) during emergencies. With the pandemic, the EOC was at some level of activation for a record-breaking 610 days. “We need that agility in order to rise to the occasion as different needs come up,” said Taylor.

Since transforming its CX capabilities, the county has been able to flexibly pivot as various situations arise. When the county instituted a fire services fee, it was able to quickly set up a service dedicated to taking calls and questions from the public (such as why the county is implementing the fee, and how it will affect the public). Rather than hiring new staff, the county was able to harness the skills of existing workers across various offices to field these calls, saving costs while delivering a better experience for citizens looking for specific answers and information.

During Hurricane Hermine, the privately funded “211 Big Bend” experienced both a power outage and generator failure. 211 Big Bend provides 24x7 human service information and assistance, including emotional support, crisis counselling, suicide prevention, and related information and referrals. The county succeeded in transferring services to a temporary operation inside the Emergency Operations Center in less than one hour, assuring those critical services could continue for Leon County citizens.

Working together in the interest of all citizens, the Leon County Sheriff, Florida State University, and the Tallahassee Police have created the ‘Real- Time Crime Center’. This acts as a “shared resource center” amongst the organizations, stationed at Florida State University and managed through the Avaya platform.

Leon County is building on its success by centralizing their employee interactions around the Avaya Communications and Collaboration Suite, recognizing that Employee Experience (EX) is equally as important as CX.

County workers hold staff meetings, team meetings, and project meetings virtually. “We’ll have people right next door to each other jumping on virtual meetings even though they can walk into the conference room,” said Taylor. “I could see this trend continuing. Workers have grown accustomed to it, and it has also been a boon for productivity.”

One of the first things we realized when we got the new system was that most of our offices didn’t need a receptionist anymore. Because of this, we were able to reallocate those positions to fill other needs of the organization,” explains Taylor.