MARYSVILLE – Mayor Dennis Kendall and other city officials are tired of the phone calls that get lost on transfer and other problems with the city’s aging telephone system.
The days of the telephone headaches are numbered.
The City Council on Nov. 15 approved buying a new telephone system for nine public buildings that will cost the city $128,000 and the Marysville Fire District $33,000.
The system will pay for itself within 20 months and will save the city about $7,000 per month, city finance director Sandy Langdon said.
The old system “outlived its usefulness,” Kendall said. “We have lots of problems with it.”
The new system should be in place by January and should cause no disruptions in phone service for residents calling city officials, Langdon said. It’s expected to improve customer service and help city staff avoid multiple transfers for individual callers.
The new system, recommended to the council by the city’s new information technology manager, Jeff Smart, is expandable and will serve the city for a long time to come.
“It’s not a Cadillac model,” Langdon said. “But this allows us to be able to control the system internally rather than through a telephone system like Verizon.”
City staff will be able to move phones around, add more lines and send computerized information from building to building.
It has built-in redundancies so that if one phone line should be disrupted, the city can shift calls to another of its three switchboards at City Hall, the Public Safety Building or the public works center, Langdon said.
The city can program the new system with options for customers to select to get them the information they need more quickly, she said. In addition, all utility customer calls currently come in to the city’s switchboard.
The current phone system was bought used. Not all phones have the same features, such as caller identification or the ability to transfer a call.
“Anything that’s electronic has a (limited) life to it,” Langdon said.
Staff can program the new system to track the number of calls that come, how many are transferred, the length of the calls and other information that will help them provide better public service, as well as make information such as the location of different buildings and hours of service available 24 hours a day.
Reporter Cathy Logg: 425-339-3437 or logg@heraldnet.com.
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