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.”
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.
