Background
The University of Central Florida (UCF) faced daily challenges with system uptime and support due to lack of communication infrastructure redundancy, exposing flaws in their previous vendor’s approach.
To address these issues, UCF partnered with Microsoft to shift to cloud services, opting for Microsoft Teams for collaboration and communication, leading to their introduction of AudioCodes Voca Conversational Interactions Center (CIC), a certified Microsoft Teams contact center built in Azure, perfect for universities needing reliable communication systems for enhancing CX across multiple campus departments.
UCF’s choice to migrate to Microsoft’s cloud services positioned them as one of the first universities of its size to embrace Microsoft Teams across all departments. However, UCF was experiencing a clear gap in uptime and usability with their existing Microsoft Teams contact center. They needed a reliable Teams contact center that could scale up or down across departments at a moment’s notice. The existing partnership between AudioCodes and UCF led to the introduction of Voca CIC being the perfect fit.
For more information, visit the University of Central Florida website.
Objectives
UCF established specific criteria when evaluating Microsoft Teams contact center options for their customer service needs. These included various factors essential to UCF’s search for a reliable and reputable CCaaS solution:
- Easy to Implement: UCF required a straightforward implementation process, coupled with a friendly user interface for easy adoption to minimize disruptions during service calls.
- Adaptable: Due to the size of the university, UCF needed a CCaaS solution to quickly grow with changing requirements, ensuring changes could be made quickly without lengthy project timelines.
- Stable: UCF emphasized the importance of a native integration with Teams to aid in system stability, aiming to minimize downtime and ensure uninterrupted communication across campuses. Their ideal solution had to deliver quick and stable performance with little to no downtime.
- Simple: Given their in-house management model, UCF wanted a contact center they could internally manage, eliminating the need to hire extra staff or allocate additional resources.
- Cost-Effective: UCF prioritized solutions that were bottom-line driven, focusing on cost-efficiency to use their resources wisely within their defined budget.
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Conversational AI call steering within Teams to enhance customer experience (CX)
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Multi-tenancy allowing multiple contact center desks to share contact center usage
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Scalable contact center to easily flex with the universities changing needs
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Guarantee a reliable system availability and redundancy to effectively service the community’s needs with minimal downtime
“One of the primary drivers we look for in a partnership is the ability to be agile with us … what we found is every time we’ve asked AudioCodes to come in and take on something … we’ve received very positive feedback that [they] have done that.”
Voca CIC Offered UCF an Azure Native Integration for Microsoft Teams
UCF faced the challenge of finding a more reliable and scalable solution with a native integration for Microsoft Teams, while offering growth potential in emerging areas like AI. After careful consideration, UCF made the choice to switch to AudioCodes Voca CIC from their previous Microsoft Teams contact center vendor.
Here’s how Voca CIC provided a tailored solution to meet UCF’s unique needs:
- Scale Up, Scale Down: Voca CIC offered UCF an azure native integration for Microsoft Teams, allowing them to quickly scale to the university’s size and future growth. Unlike other providers that require complex processes to scale, Voca CIC simplified the process with just a few clicks. Enabling UCF to quickly add new tenants for university departments across campuses, like the athletic ticketing office, medical center and police department, and future departments.
- Easy to Manage: Voca CIC empowered UCF’s IT supervisors and UC managers by allowing them to perform tasks such as access management and call flow configuration changes independently. This increased productivity and freed up the IT department, allowing them to focus on more critical tasks.
- Integrates Across Systems: Voca CIC provided UCF with advanced features, including CRM integration and ready-to-use AI, enabling agents to access relevant information in one-screen for improved customer interactions. These functionalities set Voca CIC apart from other Microsoft Teams contact center solutions, providing UCF with the tools they needed to deliver a quicker and more personalized experience for their students, faculty, and staff.
- Natural Language Call Steering: UCF streamlined the call routing process with conversational AI, allowing callers to be directed to the appropriate department or agent quickly. This not only enhances the caller experience by reducing wait times and improving call resolution, but also frees up valuable resources within the contact center, allowing agents to focus on more complex service requests and tasks.
“I’m finding that Voca CIC is more accepted than other products we’ve implemented in the past because of how easy it is to use. For us admins, the ease and quickness to create a contact center from drawing to deployment has saved us hundreds of hours and months of planning. The scalability of Voca assures us we can take on any project the University has. On top of that, the reliability, it has been such a stable product that we haven’t had any downtime.”
Keith Honaker, Lead UC and Head Architect of Contact Centers at UCF
Results
By leveraging Voca CIC, UCF was able to quickly onboard new tenants, facilitating the expansion of its communication infrastructure to meet the diverse needs of its users. A notable achievement of the Voca CIC implementation is the successful setup of all 40 contact center desks at UCF to support various university services.
UCF purchased Voca CIC through the Azure Marketplace. Their CTO, Mike Scruggs, said, “As an institution, we thought the shift to the cloud would bring us more reliability. I didn’t know at the time that we would be one of the first higher education institutions to go in this direction, but I’m proud and I think we have an opportunity for us to expand by using simplified billing practices through Azure and influence some of our other partners and Florida schools that this is viable, it’s easy and it does give you benefits.”
Overall, UCF has expressed their satisfaction with its partnership with AudioCodes and highlighted the importance of trust, value addition and scalability in their communication solution.
