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When Surf Life Saving NSW (SLS NSW) became an emergency service under the State Emergency Response Act, they needed to raise their technology stack across the board. This included improving their after-hours voice response service and rolling out a more robust and complete system for handling, prioritising and directing calls through their State Operations Centre.
Matthew Ingersole, CIO for SLS NSW talked us through the improvements they made to their State Operations Centre by rolling out the TIPT, Liberate and Dubber Call Recording Platforms.
What role does telephony play for Surf Life Saving NSW and why is it important?
MI: Surf Life Saving NSW is the state's peak coastal water safety and rescue organisation. We are an Emergency Service made up of several different businesses with different telephony needs. This mainly manifests operationally through the State Operations Centre (SOC) and Support Operations Teams. The SOC is a critical communications hub that operates 365 days a year, from 7 am to 7 pm and provides overarching support and coordination to rescue activities over the 2100km of NSW coastline.
Why was SLS NSW looking to upgrade their calling platform?
MI: Before TIPT, Surf Life Saving NSW operated a traditional PABX. Although the PABX system was robust, it lacked flexibility. It was expensive to maintain, requiring a specialist organisation to do things like change the time of day, and calling options for public holidays. The PABX lacked the portability that we have come to appreciate as one of the critical features of the TIPT system.
With the decommissioning of the ISDN platform the PABX utilised, we recognised an opportunity to look to the market for a cost effective and flexible solution to meet our changing telephony needs. Our most critical overarching requirement was for a robust, highly available system that provided a high level of call quality comparable to our existing PABX experience. After an extensive evaluation, we chose to go with TIPT.
What are the elements and features of TIPT that influenced your choice, and that make a difference to SLS NSW today?
MI: We needed a telephony system that was robust, reliable, and always works because people’s lives are on the line. One of the things that stood out about TIPT was its reliability and its uptime, as well as the fact that the quality of the calls was similar to the old PABX.
The key features of TIPT that make a difference to us are the call hunt groups, the ability to call queue, and the ability to make updates ourselves – we can add, move, and change users between hunt groups using the online portal and have it instantly reflected within the system itself.
The online portal also enables us to provision new users and set them up with numbers and handsets.
Using TIPT, we’ve set up an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) so if it's an emergency, people can press 1 and their call will be prioritised through, or if they press 2, then it'll go through to the normal call flow and one of the operators will answer it.
The other big thing would be the ability to answer calls across our choice of devices – so we can take an incoming call or make an outgoing call from the same phone number using the desk phone handset, a Liberated mobile or a softphone. This has given our teams a lot more flexibility.
Whilst there are several VoIP providers in the market, none came close to the reliability, availability, and feature set of the Telstra TIPT system. TIPT also integrates into the rest of the Telstra ecosystem.
You mentioned Liberated mobiles. Why is Liberate important for SLS NSW and how has it increased flexibility? Can you talk us through the features you use?
MI: What Liberate has really enabled our staff to do is to be able to work as effectively from home as if they were in the office.
With Liberate, users have the ability to be able to choose which device they’re going to receive the calls on; so they can answer that call on their mobile, the desk phone, or through their laptop.
For outgoing calls, they can make the call from their mobile then choose whether their mobile or landline number is displayed on the outgoing call.
It also enables us to set up time-of-day calling rules. This means that we can set it so that calls to the desk phone will only go through to the mobile between nine and five, for instance. Outside of those hours, calls to the landline won’t go to the mobile, but calls to the mobile number still will.
Using Liberate, we can include mobiles in our hunt groups – this has meant that we can set up an after-hours team. After 7 pm the incoming calls to the SOC go through to that hunt group, and they can answer those calls remotely, using their mobile phones.
We can also see where the calls that hit the mobiles are coming from and distinguish the priority of the call that is coming through. We're able to tell whether it's an internal call, a call from a member of the public, or if it's a call from another emergency service requesting our assistance for an ongoing emergency.
Liberate has enabled our staff to work flexibly in a way that benefits them. There are no other solutions like it; none integrate your desk phone and your mobile phone in the same way that Liberate does. It gives the team the flexibility to continue to monitor and take calls whilst simultaneously managing their busy schedules, often outside the office.
Earlier you mentioned the integrations with platforms like Dubber Call Recording. Why was call recording important for SLS NSW?
MI: For the last eight years, we've been recording all our radio network traffic, but the missing piece was the phone calls to and from the SOC. We’d be asked, “What time did you receive the phone call from the police? What did you do? Did someone else ring? How did a member of the public ring you?” And we never really had that information adequately recorded. Our team would take transcription notes of the call and save them in the portal. This wasn’t always accurate, and it was quite manual and time-consuming.
How did the deployment of Dubber Call Recording improve things? What are the features that have made a difference?
MI: We chose the Dubber Call Recording platform because it natively integrated with TIPT. When our operators are busy and they're under the pump, that automation, even just recording what time the calls came in, is valuable to reconstructing that incident in the after-action report. As an Emergency Service, we record calls to be able to provide evidence for after-action reviews, to provide real-world examples for training, and as required legally, by Coroners Courts etc.
Using Dubber Call Recording, we can get an automatic transcription of the call. This saves the State Operations Centre hours of having to manually write in the fields into SurfCom. Now they can copy and paste the whole chunk of the text into the incident management system.
Because it natively integrates with TIPT and Liberate, we can still record those calls when the agents aren’t in the SOC – so when they’re working from home, the after-hours emergency call-out teams etc.; we’ve got that consistency, and it means greater flexibility with our staff without losing that call recording feature.
It also allows our staff members to conduct appropriate after-incident reviews to see as an organisation what we can improve on as required; that's a massive game changer from a productivity perspective for the operators.
The other big feature would be that Dubber Call Recording has an A.I. sentiment aspect to it as well. Different parts of the transcription and the call overall will display a red face, a yellow face, or a green face – you can easily see what that call has been like and then open the transcription for insights.
Call sentiment and the ability to search the text of calls allow team managers to gain valuable business intelligence on how we are performing in providing our service. The Dubber transcription service is fantastic for our staff.
Looking at the change to your business telephony overall, how has the rollout of TIPT, Liberate and Dubber Call Recording enabled SLS NSW to serve your community better?
MI: All the tools we put in place through the digital transformation journey that we’ve gone on have enabled our staff to do their jobs better so we can respond quicker, and more effectively, and we get better outcomes for the community using technology.
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