Cirencester Town Council

The Challenge

As a central provider of many of the local community and public services, communication with locals and visitors is a key responsibility and opportunity for Cirencester Town Council. Poor quality broadband, combined with an outdated Mitel phone system had long been a problem, but it was brought to the fore during the pandemic when they were unable to easily transfer to remote working, and couldn’t put system diverts on during lockdown without significant additional technical support from their supplier. Eurolink has instead installed a user-friendly, intuitive, feature rich system that is easy to use and enhances the Council’s capability.

How Eurolink helped

With a view to maximising the effectiveness and simplicity of the system, as well as reducing the overall costs, Eurolink worked with both Cirencester Town Council, and their landlord the Bingham Library Trust, to overhaul the telecommunications system for the whole building. Eurolink migrated the system for both businesses, updating all the cabling and WiFi, adding a full fibre line for the first time (Ethernet leased line), and introducing a hosted phone system too. As well as solving the speed and productivity challenges of the previous system, the new feature-rich system provided the Council with additional productivity gains, such as the ability to transfer calls between users, including those working remotely or off-site.

Having never experienced full fibre, the Ethernet leased line has given the building dedicated connectivity that is not shared with other businesses or individuals in the vicinity. Ethernet is more resilient than traditional broadband models, ensuring 99.9% uptime, alongside faster speeds, better team productivity, and continuous availability of bandwidth to keep the phone system operational. The additional speed and uptime gains have helped boost productivity within the Council, while also supporting enhanced customer experience with quality phone calls and systems too.

Our customer-centric approach, and dedicated account manager customer care helped to win the council over, highlighting the value of having a local expert to rely on. This, combined with our solution-oriented approach to the system, has given the council a future-proof setup without the addition of significant amounts of extra equipment, and the added advantage of a contract without significant monthly maintenance charges.

At the same time, the outdated Mitel system was superseded by the Eurolink PIPPA hosted telephone system, which is feature-rich, and can be easily adapted and changed by the client. As well as enabling improved office-based communications, our PIPPA platform comes with a softphone application, enabling Council employees to work from home, using the phone system exactly as they would if they were in the office. This has supported the Council with hybrid working capabilities.

What the client thought

Johan Newman, Deputy Chief Executive Officer for Cirencester Town Council comments “Nothing tests your business infrastructure and systems quite like the unexpected, and the pandemic highlighted just how limiting our historic telecoms and IT system were. Eurolink has been very proactive and solution-oriented, adding systems that not only work effectively, but give us significant gains in other areas, such as being able to support home working, being able to transfer calls to team members that are not traditionally office-based, and having overall better speeds and productivity. They’ve even been able to save us money by reducing the amount of hardware we need, and reducing our overall costs. Our landlord the Bingham Library Trust has also been able to benefit from the upgrade, thanks to the dedicated ethernet line that has given us both access to full fibre.”

About Cirencester Town Council

Cirencester Town Council is a town council in Gloucestershire, supporting approximately 20,000 residents across eight wards. They provide proactive local services, as well as fostering long-term community engagement, to create a sense of civic pride and a thriving town.

Phone: 01285 655 646

Website: https://cirencester.gov.uk/