Although GDST’s previous on-prem telephony system performed well, it lacked several capabilities that the organization deemed increasingly important after the pandemic.
Mike Coram, Head of Service Delivery, cites the biggest challenge: “We determined that we needed a phone system that integrated well with Microsoft Teams. Employees at all our schools use Teams for internal messaging, but our phone system did not connect into Teams, which meant everyone had two communication apps open all the time.”
Maintaining the old system also required everyone to make and receive external calls from physical phones on their desks, which created challenges for employees that spent much of their time moving between locations.
With the on-prem system, Mike adds, all administrative changes had to run through his team at the organization’s head office.
“We have 25 schools across the country and a total of 40 locations. We wanted to make it easy for our schools to adjust their own IVRs, add users, and make other simple changes. The old system was difficult enough that anytime a school wanted to make one of these changes, they had to ask my team. And for more complex administrative updates, we often had to submit a ticket to the third-party IT firm managing the system.”
Yet another drawback, Mike points out, was the on-prem system’s inability to give GDST any insights into how employees were using the phones at schools and offices across the country.
