Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU)

At a glance

The issue:
Aging legacy telephony equipment was beginning to fail and needed replacing. When the pandemic hit, the updated system had to additionally support a remote workforce as they maintained student facing services.

The project:
The legacy telephony infrastructure was replaced with a RingCentral cloud telephone service running on 200 staff laptops and around 40 refuge devices. Numbers were migrated, devices were configured and the old Unify infrastructure was retired.

The outcome:
The new service is reliable, user-friendly and offers advanced features along with valuable analytics. The platform supports a new agile working model and is flexible enough to grow and change alongside this rapidly expanding business.

The Background

Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) began life in 1862 as an Anglican teacher training college for women and achieved full university status in 2012. Currently educating over 2,000 students, the university remains a small and friendly university while expanding and developing its portfolio of undergraduate courses, traditional PGCE teacher training routes, work-based Foundation Degrees, Master’s courses and Doctoral study.

The need to adapt with the times became apparent almost overnight following the pandemic, forcing BGU to assess their aging systems and to look at new solutions that would address their challenges. Following a successful free trial of RingCentral’s solution that exceeded expectations, Maintel were brought in to roll out the solution in its entirety.

The Challenge

In 2020, BGU’s 15 year old telephony infrastructure was reaching end of life, and required weekly rebooting to clear call logs and caches to prevent it from regularly failing. At the same time, the pandemic forced the IT team to consider remote options as staff moved to a work from home model.

After leveraging Microsoft Teams to conduct internal communications, a replacement for the desk phones in now empty offices was needed to maintain the university’s external communication with students and suppliers.

In particular, the telephony service needed to be reliably available in time for ‘confirmation and clearing’ weekend, which is a critically important time for the university to fill courses for the next academic year.

As a small and agile organisation, BGU could move quickly. They identified RingCentral as an emerging company in the Gartner Quadrant for cloud-based telephony and immediately provisioned 30 accounts on the platform on an extended free trial basis.

Critical student facing departments were migrated including admissions, student support, student placement and student employability. This allowed the university’s vital phone-based services to continue and keep the business running while they formulated a more widespread and permanent plan.

The Solution

BGU chose a 3 year contract for cloud based telephony with Maintel using the RingCentral platform, and Maintel helped reduce 450 individual lines on the former Unify system down to 200 users with an additional 40 refuge devices such as support phones in corridors, emergency care lines in lifts.

Now that telephony is no longer desk dependent, it can be used from anywhere across multiple devices, and users were given a windows based laptop, docking station and headphones.

The RingCentral platform delivered several advanced features including call routing, interactive voice response (IVR) and call queues. Additionally, automated reporting allows for the monitoring of call quality, usage, device status, and more.

The extended business rollout was supported by the university’s 30 initial RingCentral users, who had become advocates for the new system’s advanced capabilities.

What are the benefits?

Reliability: Calls no longer drop or fail to connect, allowing staff and students to maintain close communication and ensuring that the busy confirmation and clearing period runs smoothly.

Usability: University staff have found the simple phone system to be extremely user friendly. Removing legacy handsets from desktops has given the workforce the flexibility to use their telephony anywhere and across multiple devices supporting agile working practices.

Reporting & Analytics: The team can monitor who is making and receiving high volumes of calls, and study analytics for the critical confirmation and clearing period. This allows them to ensure adequate staff coverage and adjust their telephony requirements more accurately.

Security: Maintel integration of the new RingCentral platform has allowed BGU to take advantage of other services including Azure single sign-on and multi-factor authentication to wrap a higher level of security around the user base. The RingCentral platform has also flagged and blocked fraudulent international phone numbers against a control list, which may have prevented financial or data loss.

Management: The IT team are now able to manage the service and make changes from anywhere, at any time. Having been administering the platform for a year and a half, there is so far nothing that their complex business hasn’t been able to accommodate within the RingCentral platform.

Cost Savings: As a direct result of moving to cloud-based telephony, BGU have reduced their dependence on business-provided mobile phones by 60%+.

What does the future hold?

Moving forward, the university is planning to undertake a network infrastructure review, as they may be able to reduce their network hardware switch capacity.

When the 3 year contract comes up for renewal, they are confident that the reporting capabilities of the new system will provide a clearer roadmap of the new technologies they may wish to invest in for the future, and further reduce their need for mobile telephony.