Lipson Co-operative Academy is a secondary school in the heart of Plymouth catering for over 1,000 students from a broad background.
The Challenge
The school had reviewed their telephony year on year, the costs for a replacement system, however, had been prohibitive.
With the availability of new, cost-effective technologies, a working group was formed in May 2018 with key stakeholders to define the future system.
The key themes for the new system included:
- Greater standardisation – no mixed handset hardware.
- Softphones so that all staff can access a telephone from their PC.
- A mobile app to seamlessly connect mobile devices with the main system.
- An auto attendant to reduce the time needed to connect with a range of ring groups.
- Voicemail to email – allowing messages to be clearly delivered to all members of staff as required.
- Software that makes use of existing hardware and connectivity. This utilised their current infrastructure and makes use of our already established redundancy measures.
We are delighted with the result of the project. Working with Cobalt has provided us with an expert partner to support the installation and training of our new phone system. The 3CX system has been very intuitive and after only a short training introduction our own team have been able to make use of a range of features to improve the flow of communication.
Adam Hodgess: Learning & Technology Manager
The Solution
We delivered a new 3CX telephone system which provided the school with 70 physical phones to cater to their faculty of 200. Many users access the telephone system via a PC app and voicemail is used throughout the school with a reliance on voicemail to email integration. The new system was deployed in the school’s virtualised server environment and connected to ‘SIP Trunks’; which not only reduced their costs but greatly improved their efficiency. The introduction of an automated answering system relieves the pressure on main reception at peak times and also allows absences to be reported automatically, making it easy for both parents and staff.
A Little Extra
The hosted system allowed for easy growth as additional extensions could be added at a low cost, one user at a time. This made it easy to budget for future growth.