Case Study: UC Riverside Modernizes Campus Communications With Zoom

University of California, Riverside (UCR) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California. It serves 26,426 students, including 22,646 undergraduate and 3,780 graduate students.

In 2020, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, UCR faculty quickly transitioned course materials and instruction online.

Challenges

UCR integrated its Zoom Meetings platform with Canvas LMS and productivity tools like Slack to support faculty hosting class meetings on Zoom.

Later, when UCR faculty and students began meeting in person again, instructors needed to teach students in the classroom while accommodating students attending virtually.

When Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer Matthew Gunkel joined UCR in March 2022, the most urgent priority for UCR Information Technology Solutions (ITS) was to rework UCR’s ageing network infrastructure.

The network included UCR’s landline telephone service infrastructure, which was implemented in the 1980s and housed in a building with a leaking roof.

In addition to upgrading the telephone infrastructure, UCR organizations and departments required more robust contact centre functionality for managing and routing calls and data capture.

The Solution

In 2022, like UCR, several other University of California campuses needed to modernize their landline telephone service solutions.

The University of California Office of The President considered the requirements across all UC campuses and selected Zoom Phone and Zoom contact centre, which provided a VoIP phone solution and call management service that integrated well with UCR’s existing technology ecosystem and offered a familiar user interface.

Another reason UCR selected Zoom was that the University of California system had a good working relationship with Zoom and saw that Zoom was updating its products to meet higher education requirements.

UCR ITS grew interested in adding Zoom Rooms technology to enhance UCR’s classrooms and shared workspaces by providing a single login and consistent user interface for classroom and meeting room hardware, room scheduling tools, digital whiteboards, and other features.

“The Zoom platform integrates flexibly with commodity hardware. UCR decided to license Zoom Rooms because it would allow the University to leverage different combinations of low-cost hardware devices (video cameras, microphones, speakers, etc.) in alignment with each college and department’s needs.”

Over the past 18 months, UCR has transitioned over 5,000 phone lines to Zoom Phone and has moved three of its ten campus contact centres, including the UCR Office of Financial Aid and UCR Health – the clinical enterprise of the UCR School of Medicine – over to Zoom contact centre. They plan to migrate more of their contact centres to Zoom contact centre in the next 12 to 18 months.

The UCR Financial Aid office went live with Zoom Phone and Zoom contact centre in April 2023. Assistant Director of Financial Aid Monica Martinez-Daniels says she noticed from the initial Zoom contact centre demonstrations that Zoom contact centre was easier to use and navigate than the Financial Aid team’s existing contact centre solution.

UCR Health went live with Zoom Phone and Zoom contact centre in October 2023. Though UCR Health was exploring a different contact centre solution in 2022, it discovered after adopting Zoom contact centre for other departments that its functionality also met the health organization’s needs.

Zoom was able to sign UCR Health’s Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to enable UCR Health to maintain protected health information (PHI) security and support their HIPAA compliance.

UCR Health physicians and back-office staff use Zoom Phone lines and physical desk phones, while the call centre and referral agents use Zoom contact centre.

UCR has deployed over 100 Zoom Rooms since Fall 2022. In 2023, the UCR ITS Multimedia and Classroom Technology team partnered with the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences on a pilot programme focused on technology-assisted teaching methods.

In the pilot, a cohort of graduate student instructors provided feedback, helping the team understand which Zoom Room features were most beneficial. UCR is currently piloting Zoom Rooms’ integrated reservation technology in select shared spaces, including the Student Success Center, and expects to roll it out more broadly throughout 2024.

The Results

Today, the UCR community leverages Zoom Meetings, Webinars, Phone, contact centre, and Rooms. Gunkel says implementing multiple Zoom solutions for different university services has provided vertical integration advantages and simplified both the management and user experience for the services.

For example, the Zoom Rooms functionality standardizes classrooms and shared spaces, creating a consistent interface for end users to leverage the technology in any room across campus.

When class or meeting attendees get a Zoom Calendar invite to meet in a room with Zoom Rooms functionality, they can log in to use the microphones, speakers, video cameras, and displays with one touch from the calendar event.

Students, faculty, and staff who have never used Zoom Rooms can usually accomplish their goals without requiring support because they are already familiar with the Zoom interface.

Since deploying Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms, ITS has received fewer support calls related to phone or room technology issues.

Further, Gunkel says transitioning to Zoom Phone has benefited UCR from a maintenance and overhead cost perspective.

ITS is deploying and maintaining less physical infrastructure as they no longer need to physically run new phone lines to office spaces when faculty and staff move to new locations.

The team has set up Zoom Phone to auto-provision phone numbers and features, and they can easily adjust each account’s configuration to meet user needs.

In the UCR Office of Financial Aid, Martinez-Daniels says Zoom contact centre offers helpful functions that the team did not have in their previous contact centre solution.

For example, Zoom contact centre provides a “Whisper” feature that allows supervisors to listen in while new staff members assist callers.

Supervisors use the “Whisper” feature to guide new student workers answering calls, while the caller hears the student worker but not the supervisor.

Martinez-Daniels says Zoom contact centre also allows more customization in its configuration compared to their previous solution and lets the Office of Financial Aid align its phone tree menu to route calls to specialized financial aid units.

For example, a caller seeking information about veterans’ benefits can route themself directly to the veterans’ benefits team rather than waiting in the general financial aid queue.

Another helpful feature is that when students call in, they get information on how many callers are ahead of them in the queue and the average wait time to help temper their expectations.

According to Martinez-Daniels, Zoom contact centre captures more data than their previous solution, enabling more robust reporting.

Now that the Office of Financial Aid has been using Zoom contact centre for almost a year, the team is beginning to leverage its data to help them evaluate year-over-year trends and assess their staffing and communication strategies.

Linda Roney, UCR Health Director of Performance Excellence, says Zoom contact centre allows the UCR Health team to provide patients with a more efficient call-in experience.

When patients call the main UCR Health line, they can select from several phone tree options to reach the correct department.

Meanwhile, the integration between Zoom Phone and contact centre allows the agents answering Zoom contact centre calls to see when physicians and back-office staff are busy with patients.

Roney has noticed that Zoom has been receptive to her team’s feedback on functions they would like to see in Zoom contact centre.

Before transitioning to Zoom Phone and contact centre, UCR Health asked for functionality to enable callers to listen to instructional recordings in Spanish. Based on UCR’s and other customers’ requests, Zoom rolled out the capability for callers to set their engagement language.

Gunkel says that UCR has not experienced significant Zoom service outages, and his team has only needed to contact Zoom for engineering support related to the institution’s specific configurations.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Zoom – View the Original Article

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