Pan-Atlantic University is a private, not-for-profit educational institution. The university has a history of 13 years as a graduate university. With the movement of the university to its main campus in Ibeju-Lekki, a 100-hectare land space, it commenced undergraduate programs in November 2014. The university has more than 400 students and around 150 employees working in 20 departments, on several campuses.

For many years, the university employed a local legacy telephony carrier, but as it experienced unprecedented expansion in terms of students, employees, and locations, the shortcomings of using an outdated phone system became obvious. The lack of multitenancy and advanced telephony features such as voicemail, conferencing, automatic call distribution, as well as detailed reports on call activity made communication processes hard to handle and manage. That was when the university decided to have its legacy telephony system replaced with a state-of-the-art telephony solution that allowed for all the advanced PBX capabilities missing at that time.

Following a recommendation from local network consultancy company Spantree, the university put VoipNow to the test and, at the end of the evaluation period, decided to implement it because it:

• Is easy to deploy on a bare-metal server, in a virtual environment
• Doesn't require an upfront investment
• Comes with a highly discounted licensing designed for education institutions
• Doesn't entail the desk phones to be replaced
• Allows for new extensions to be added to the system with little to zero effort
• Can be easily configured from the web interface
• Ensures flexible billing with customizable charging plans for departments and users
• Has advanced call control and monitoring capabilities
• Allows for multitenant management for different users and departments
• Supports audio conferencing, call cascading, simple and complex IVR scenarios
• Provides detailed reports and charts on call activities.

Thanks to VoipNow’s straightforward configuration and user-friendly web interface, the university staff didn’t need much training in learning how to use it, which saved them both time and money.

Before implementing VoipNow, the staff felt the direct impact of managing incoming traffic, which sometimes led to missed calls and frustrated callers. With VoipNow, the university staff relies on various call management capabilities:

• The Call Cascading gives employees the certainty that calls are picked up by someone in the office whenever the person called is in a meeting or simply unable to answer the phone.
• The Call Forwarding allows the staff to be reachable even if they are outside the office.
• The IVR increases customer satisfaction because it permits offices and departments to create auto-attendant voice menus that enable callers to reach the exact person they want to talk to.
• The Voicemail allows callers to leave important messages for the staff.
• The Conference feature makes it possible to have virtual meetings with staff from different departments and campuses within the university as well as with colleagues from other universities.
• The Reports area provides access to statistics for the incoming and outgoing traffic of each extension and user.
• The Do Not Disturb (DND) feature is helpful in situations where extension owners cannot be disturbed.
• The Intercom calls all extensions at once whenever an important message must get through; this feature is extremely useful in case of emergency because, even if no one can pick up the call, the message is played to all extensions.

Pan Atlantic University has been using VoipNow in a private cloud for less than a year, but it already sees the benefits of replacing their old telephony system with an advanced Unified Communications platform.

No upfront investment

The platform's smooth integration with the existing infrastructure cut down costs as the university was not forced to invest in a new infrastructure or to replace desk phones in order to use VoipNow.

Special academic licensing

The university sees the highly discounted perpetual licensing for academic and cultural institutions as a big advantage. Having the freedom to add extensions whenever necessary and being able to pay only for the resources used is equally important. Unnecessary expenses are thus avoided and money is saved for other investments.

Transparent and easy-to-manage charging

Billing comes with flexible options, charging plans can be customized on multiple levels, departments, and the charging engine works in real-time, which makes it easier for the staff to customize call costs and control call routing.

Complete overview of call activities

With so many departments and associated extensions, call activities would be hard to track, if it weren't for the advanced call reports and statistics detailing call flows, call reports, charging etc.

Multitenancy

VoipNow comes with a role-based multitenant design, which gives the staff the possibility to configure each level of administration with specific permissions and limits. This way, users have access to certain call flows and can share specific resources.

"We have just deployed the VoipNow Unified Communications software and it has given us advanced PBX capabilities. The rich feature-set allows us to easily manage heavy traffic and thus improve communication with our staff, students and collaborators. To gain all that with a major discount, thanks to the academic licensing, was a major relief on our budget. Thanks, 4PSA!"                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

 Nnamdi Nwokoye, university representative

VoipNow is a cloud communications platform that enables service providers and organizations to benefit from hosted enterprise telephony, video, presence, instant messaging, conferencing, contact center tools, and mobility. The multi-awarded platform is a blazing fast go-to-market solution, due to its rapid set-up and easy deployment, integrated charging and billing engine, and competitive pricing plan. For more information on VoipNow please contact: sales@4psa.com.