City of Independence, from Analog Phones to Microsoft Teams and Five9 over 20 locations

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and UC leads in public sector or multi-site organisations planning a legacy PBX to Teams Phone migration, and anyone weighing a cloud contact centre alongside Teams with a small operations team.

Guest: Chris A. Johnson — Municipal Cyber Center Manager / IT Manager, City of Independence, Missouri

Chris A. Johnson, IT manager at the City of Independence, Missouri, describes replacing a patched-together analog Avaya estate across 30 municipal buildings with Microsoft Teams Phone and Five9, delivered with AVI-SPL. He covers the hybrid on-prem/cloud decision, contact centre gains for utility customers, and how a 10-person team changed its operating model for the cloud.

Many thanks to AVI-SPL, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The legacy Avaya estate had grown by bolt-on over years with multiple PBXs and no holistic design; spares such as power supplies and fan modules were being bought off eBay, which was the trigger for a full infrastructure refresh rather than a phone-only project. ▶ 2:36
• The city supports around 2,000 users across 30 buildings — 20 occupied, 10 unoccupied but still needing connectivity — covering police, fire, EMS and city-run electric, water and wastewater utilities, so voice is a critical service, not just office telephony. ▶ 3:36
• They evaluated on-prem, all-cloud and hybrid, and landed on hybrid: two data centres (primary and DR) remain for some services, while Microsoft 365 was already the collaboration platform, making Teams Phone the low-friction option. ▶ 4:37
• Rival cloud SIP providers were rejected because each required an additional application on the endpoint — another tool for IT to manage and for a largely non-technical local-government workforce to learn. ▶ 5:08
• The single utilities customer service line runs 15–25 agents busy from open to close; agents previously toggled between separate systems for resident data, billing and service connects/disconnects. Five9 consolidated that into one interface with automated call and workflow routing, cutting hold times and generating positive resident feedback. ▶ 7:09
• Moving the contact centre to Five9 let agents work remotely instead of being tied to a cubicle farm, which Johnson rates as a significant morale, quality-of-life and team-effectiveness win in a hard-to-staff role. ▶ 8:11
• AVI-SPL supplied project management, consulting and per-solution subject matter experts; the Five9 workstream was originally scheduled at about a year and reached user acceptance testing in a few months, letting the resident-facing contact centre go live while other infrastructure upgrades continued. ▶ 10:13
• With only 10 IT staff for 2,000 users, the payoff was operational: onboarding and offboarding agents, patching and vulnerability work are now done remotely using cloud templates and automation rather than on-site visits. ▶ 12:14
• New capabilities not previously possible included a multilingual menu with automatic routing to Spanish-speaking agents, plus web and chat channels alongside voice. ▶ 13:15
• Adoption tactics went beyond the usual video guides — on-site, face-to-face hands-on training shortened the adoption curve; to win budget approval Johnson used a car analogy, arguing leadership pays for the seat belts, airbags and bumpers they never think about, not just the driving experience. ▶ 14:46

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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