How One School Network Made Calling Easy

Early on in my career, I was fortunate to have a very wise sales mentor who was happy to share many valuable business tips with me. One golden nugget that particularly stuck in my mind was this: “We have two ears and one mouth, and we should use them proportionally.”

The truth of this statement was recently brought home to me when following up on a project that I worked on with the Concord School District in New Hampshire, USA. Concord has around 5,000 students and 1,000 staff members spread over seven school buildings.

Eager to embark on the digital transformation journey, Concord had decided to adopt Microsoft to meet their unified communications (UC) needs and had selected AudioCodes’ session border controllers (SBCs) as a key element of their UC infrastructure.

Naturally, I kept in close contact with the team at Concord to ensure that they were happy with their choice. In fact, it was during our weekly standup call that my mentor’s sales advice proved especially useful.

From seemingly out of nowhere, one of the IT managers suddenly remarked that the school’s existing auto-attendant system for routing incoming calls was too cumbersome and hard to manage in such a large, multi-site environment. In particular, the admin interface was a considerable challenge to reprogram whenever changes were necessary – which, unfortunately, was very often. Could AudioCodes help?

My ears immediately pricked up. Of course we could!

After all, this is exactly why AudioCodes created Voca, a flexible, off-the-shelf Conversational IVR solution that delivers a delightful calling experience from the very first moment a call is made. It utilizes a whole bunch of smart, unique IVR features to quickly learn an organization’s specific terminology – such as contact names and departments – so callers can navigate seamlessly through any phone menu simply by talking.

Thanks to Voca, the days of endlessly tapping away on a phone keypad or waiting ages for an operator are consigned firmly to the past.

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Voca – Agile Voice-Enabled IVR
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Once convinced that Voca was the solution they’d been looking for, Concord went ahead with the deployment with AudioCodes accompanying them every step of the way. And, I’m pleased to say, Voca more than fulfilled their expectations.

This is just some of the feedback I got:

• “Even though many of the families in our district aren’t native English speakers, Voca understands different accents immediately so everyone can get great service quickly.”
• “This solution really promotes safety because busy parents don’t need to worry about pressing call menu numbers while they’re driving to and from work.”
• “We don’t need to devote hours of IT time to managing Voca. Our receptionists can easily keep an eye on things in the course of their regular duties.”
• “Training was a piece of cake and AudioCodes’ continued support has been an absolute godsend.”

So, as you can see, it certainly pays to listen – for everyone. Thanks to the advice I was given when I was just starting out, I now have yet another very satisfied customer with a lot of very satisfied callers.

Want to find out how to make life EASY for your callers?