Girls’ Day School Trust
UK-based Girls’ Day School Trust saves £100,000 migrating all 4,000+ employees to RingEX
£100K
saved by not having to extend their existing phone contract, thanks to rapid migration to RingEX
6
weeks to migrate all 4,000 employees to RingEX–with no disruptions
£40k
was saved in hardware costs because they were able to reuse 1,700 existing handsets to RingEX
We have 25 schools across the UK, and in 6 weeks we had to migrate all 4,000 of our employees across all those locations onto RingEX. If we missed that deadline, we would have to pay for a one-year extension to maintain phone service with our existing provider. Thanks to RingCentral’s team, and the intuitiveness of the platform itself, we pulled it off–and saved tens of thousands of pounds.
Mike Coram
Head of Service Delivery
The UK’s leading family of girls’ schools
When its founders launched the Girls' Day School Trust in 1872, girls in the United Kingdom had very few opportunities to receive a top-tier education. GDST (Girls’ Day School Trust) became so revered at providing a high-quality, girls-only learning environment that the charity simply never stopped–and, in fact, has grown to become the largest family of girls’ schools in the country.
Today, GDST has 25 schools, including 23 independent schools and 2 academies, across England and Wales, serving 19,000 students each year. These schools deliver an outstanding education, tailored to each student, across a range of subjects–including STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), literature, languages, and leadership. At the GDST they develop character beyond the curriculum and concentrate on creating an environment where all can thrive and learn from each other.
INDUSTRY
Education
HQ
London, United Kingdom
YEAR FOUNDED
1872
EMPLOYEES
4,000+
Integrating seamlessly into Microsoft Teams
Although GDST’s previous on-prem telephony system performed well, it lacked several capabilities that the organisation 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 organisation’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.
From a reporting and analytics standpoint, the old phone system was a black box. We had zero visibility into how our teams and schools used the phones. Finding a system that could offer the most insights became a key factor in our decision, and RingCentral’s detailed analytics capabilities played a big part in why we chose RingEX.
Mike Coram
Head of Service Delivery
Many operational improvements from a single solution
As a charitable organisation always careful with its budget, GDST put out an RFP to find the best phone system at the right price point.
Mike notes that in addition to meeting all the organisation’s must-have capabilities–a deep integration with Teams, a user-friendly admin portal the schools could use to make their own changes, and sophisticated data analytics–RingEX was also reasonably priced.
“We initiated contact with RingCentral through feedback from our network of Charity IT Leaders and were so very impressed with RingCentral’s RFP response,” Mike explains. “To help ensure we had the best possible experience, our RingCentral sales team put us in touch with their UK-based reseller, Total Computers, so we’d have local experts to help us along the way.”
Working through Total Computers in the UK really helped make the process run smoothly. They helped us sort out exactly what we needed in terms of functionality and how best to roll out the solution to our school and office locations throughout the country.
Mike Coram
Head of Service Delivery
With RingEX as GDST’s primary phone system, the organisation has experienced operational and workflow improvements at all locations and among all teams.
For example, Mike says, “RingEX’s flexibility proved extremely valuable for our organisation, allowing each employee to choose their preferred phone environment.”
For the 100+ employees at our Trust Office, we no longer needed desk phones. Now we make and receive calls with the RingCentral dialer in Microsoft Teams. And for the 1,700 employees across GDST who wanted to keep their desk phones, RingCentral made that easy too. We were able to reprogram them to work with RingEX, and save us purchasing new physical phones.
Mike Coram
Head of Service Delivery
Additionally, Mike explains, schools and individual teams across the GDST family can now quickly and easily adjust their own phone environments anytime they want.
“The fact that the RingEX admin portal is so easy to use helps our organisation in two ways. First, it makes life easier for every school enabling them to update their own hunt groups, IVRs, or other call rules, and that makes them more efficient. Second, it helps my team because we are no longer handling every one of those requests–and we now have more time to focus on important strategic work.”
Adding additional value with RingCentral app integrations
RingEX also helped GDST address the mass-notifications rule for K12 schools in the UK “In addition to its Teams integration, we saw RingCentral integrates with InformaCast Fusion, our notification service. Now we can initiate a mass notification from anywhere and send it simultaneously to all the numbers in our RingEX environment–all desk phones, all mobile devices, and all extensions for our employees using the RingCentral embedded app for Teams.”
Keeping costs down with RingEX
For all the operational improvements GDST has gained since moving all 4,000 employees to RingEX, Mike and his team find it incredible that the migration has in fact lowered the organisation’s overall telephony costs.
Our costs fell with RingCentral in several ways. Per-licence costs are lower than with the old system. We saved what we had assumed would be a heavy cost to replace those 1,700 desk phones for employees who wanted to keep them. And we are no longer hosting hardware or paying for maintenance and a third-party to manage our phone system. That is a nice bonus for what amounted to a massive upgrade in our telephony capabilities.
Mike Coram
Head of Service Delivery