For ETCOG’s IT team, a communications-system upgrade was already on the roadmap pre-COVID. The association’s employees were becoming increasingly frustrated with their on-premise phone system—which made it difficult to manage even basic features, such as forwarding calls.
The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the association to even more shortcomings of their legacy phone infrastructure. One problem that became obvious immediately was the inability to forward customer calls to employees at home.
To illustrate another problem, IT Systems Administrator Brandon Deaton recalls a heartbreaking story. “Employees at our workforce centers said calls had stopped coming into the office, which made no sense because you’d expect the pandemic and the unemployment that resulted to create a spike in calls for help,” he says.
Brandon investigated and uncovered the problem. Call volume had gone up so much, so quickly, the overwhelmed system began diverting calls to voicemail. Then, because it could store only so many voicemails, it stopped recording them.
“The first voicemail I listened to was a woman crying, saying she had no food in her fridge and was desperate for our help,” recalls Brandon. “It put tears in my eyes. Thankfully, our directors authorized us to fast-tracked procuring a new communications system.”
