Running a city means running dozens of operations at once: police and fire protection, utilities, public works, parks, and administration, just to name a few. Each of these departments has its own building, its own staff, and its own daily demands, but they all need to be able to communicate with each other—and with the residents they serve—without any friction or barriers.
That's the communications balancing act that the City of Frankfort, Indiana, handles with deft precision. We spoke with Shane Jacoby, the city's Information Systems Administrator, about how OnSIP's hosted VoIP platform has supported the city’s departments through more than a decade of change, including a pandemic and an ongoing wave of municipal growth.
The City of Frankfort is the county seat of Clinton County, Indiana, located along the state's central corridor between Indianapolis and Lafayette. Founded in 1830, the city has spent the years since building out the services that keep a growing Hoosier community thriving, from its police and fire departments to its utilities and public works operations. Frankfort is expanding its boundaries toward the Interstate 65 corridor while also currently developing plans to construct a fourth fire station to keep pace with that growth. It’s the community’s first new station since 1968.
From his seat in the IT department, Shane supports the phone service needs of city staff across 17 civic departments and 24 buildings, all with phones in them of course. Frankfort’s Police Department also depends on mobile connectivity for officers who are out on patrol.
Before OnSIP, the City of Frankfort ran its phones on the Nortel Norstar, a legacy digital key business telephone system installed separately in many of those municipality buildings. Shane says the Norstar system provided reliable telephone service over many years, but it just wasn't built to connect the city's distributed workforce. "Local extension-to-extension calls were limited to each building’s individual phone system," he explains. "To call another building, we had to place a normal local telephone call." On top of that limitation, the aging hardware meant call quality never surpassed that of an average phone call.
The city's move to OnSIP predates Shane's current role in managing the account; this past project was originally led by a colleague who has since left the department. What's clear now is the result: OnSIP's hosted VoIP platform has handled the City of Frankfort's calls without interruption since 2016.
"OnSIP has greatly increased our ability for interoffice communications," Shane notes. "Now we can simply dial the extension of the staff member whom we need to talk to, or transfer a call to where it needs to go, without dialing a separate phone number and competing with other callers over plain old telephone service." What used to require a local phone call between city buildings now happens with a simple four-digit extension.
City staff also appreciate having their voicemail messages delivered straight to their email inboxes (the voicemail to email feature). From there, staff members can easily forward those messages onto any other colleague who needs to hear them, without having to dial PIN numbers or star codes to access a voicemail manager.
And when municipal projects require multiple people to be pulled into one conversation (whether they’re staff from different departments or outside partners), Frankfort's team relies on OnSIP's conference suites to host their conference calls. "It's especially useful when it's hard to meet face-to-face or when a video meeting isn't as agile as a phone call," he observes.
Across the city's 17 departments, staff draw upon a broad set of OnSIP business calling features: announcements, business hour rules, a dial by name directory, simultaneous ring groups, music on hold, voicemail, outbound E911, external phone numbers, a company directory, and call reports. Highlighting OnSIP’s flexible VoIP service, he specifies that “we use different combinations of these features depending on each department's needs, and we adjust that mix as those needs change over time.”
As Frankfort continues to grow and expand, Shane finds that the call feature set he manages follows suit. "Over time I am asked to implement more features, like call recording and attendant menus, that provide better service for taxpayers," he says.
Frankfort's police officers depend on the OnSIP softphone app to stay connected when they’re away from the station. "Officers on patrol use the OnSIP app on their laptops or cellphones to simplify making calls or catch up on voicemail messages from the public or the office," Shane explains, whether that means returning a resident's call or staying up to speed with department bulletins and notices.
That same flexibility carried the city through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We used OnSIP during COVID to allow our city and utility departments to remain effective, especially during the national shutdown.” OnSIP’s cloud-based VoIP calling enabled essential city services to continue reaching residents even as in-person operations were disrupted and staff were told to stay away from gathering together in offices.
Asked about his experience working with OnSIP's Customer Support Team, Shane is quick to answer:
"Our experience has been exceptional. Your support team is very knowledgeable and asks meaningful questions to provide timely and accurate solutions."
That reliability, he says, is what ultimately stands out most after a decade (and counting) with OnSIP:
"The best compliment is that your service is rock solid and consistently stable, to the extent that everyone knows that their phone is going to work when they need it, without fail. Many other things fail, but OnSIP phone service is consistently reliable."
In city government, reliable phone service is much more than a convenience; it's a key part of how residents experience their local government. OnSIP is proud to help the City of Frankfort keep that connection strong, department by department, call by call.