Dialpad Brings Modern Cloud Communications to Education Market
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 30, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Just as the business world is changing, and rapidly adapting to new technologies, so too is the education market. At Educause, in Philadelphia, Dialpad will demonstrate why institutions of higher education are quickly embracing a modern approach to communications. These institutions are moving away from traditional PBX and legacy desk phones that have been the standard modes of teacher and administration communications with students for generations.
As classes and interactions between faculty and students have become more collaborative so too is how they communicate. "The days of waiting in halls for office hours to schedule a meeting with a professor have gone by the wayside," said Craig Walker, CEO of Dialpad. "Students are text messaging with their teachers, and the younger, more connected professors want to be reached from anywhere. At the same time, the professor doesn't want to be providing their phone number to students as they seek to have personal and academic life balance, much like the person in business does."
Administrators and registrars are also finding that text messaging students can secure faster responses, as the students tend to ignore email or voicemail, as today's generation of college students grew up with messaging apps to communicate with family and friends.
"The college freshman of today was born in 1999," added Walker. "Their entire life from the time they were handed their first mobile phone was organized using text, not voice. Today, modern education communication is mirroring that, so educational institutions need to be equipped to communicate and engage with the students the way they already are behaving," added Walker.
The cloud is also playing a crucial role in education communications. IT departments are overtaxed and lack time to keep up with demands for support, let alone manage on-premise PBX and Exchange Servers. It's one of the reasons why educational IT has embraced Google's G Suite so rapidly. With the move to the cloud higher educational institutions are saving money, adding functionality, improving service to their most visible and active constituents, the professors and the students. This all points to the need for an integrated phone system.
In parallel, the way students are dynamic, engaged, smart, and mobile. The way they learn and expect to be educated has already changed. With their social and academic lives based around their mobile phones, they now collaborate at all hours with one another and expect to be able to work with their teachers and professors the same way.
"It's all about the educator reaching and developing the 18 and 19 year olds on a mobile phone as the student, who typically don't use the phone for anything other than texting. When you consider that parents are paying up to a quarter of a million dollars for education over the next four years, the importance of being in touch with the students and their academic peers can't be understated," said Walker, the parent of a college freshman. "Young adults have grown up digital. They stream Netflix, communicate using WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Facebook. They may use email for longer form communications, but most of all they have also eliminated the use of the dorm phone. Add in younger assistant professors, resident life leaders, and other staff, and we're finding that they all want to communicate the way their students do."
In the case of Dialpad customer Denison University, by transitioning away from its archaic on-premise hardware, Denison University simultaneously reduced the need for bulky desk phones and an outdated restriction: that staff could only take calls from their office. Dialpad also gives faculty and staff at the university the option to communicate using a mobile phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.
"The desk phone is dead," said Dena Speranza, CIO. "Dialpad aligns beautifully with our strategy to enable people to work from anywhere from any device."
Adopting cloud communications has allowed Denison University to integrate various solutions in intelligent ways. By integrating G Suite with Dialpad, it now is easy for anyone to see context around conversations.
"The integration with G Suite is beautiful," said Speranza. "While in Dialpad, I can instantly see files we've worked on together and upcoming meetings we share, making for a more efficient conversation. Additionally, Denison no longer has to manually publish and maintain a campus phone directory since the list is automatically synced through G Suite."
To Learn More About Dialpad and Education, Please Visit:
Denison University Builds an Anywhere Worker IT Stack with Dialpad & G Suite
ABOUT DIALPAD
Dialpad is communications simplified for every business. Available on any device, anywhere, Dialpad includes voice, video, messaging and meetings; and is integrated with Microsoft Office 365 and Google's G Suite. Dialpad is also the only business communications system built on the Google Cloud Platform. Today, over 48,000 customers and more than 65 percent of the Fortune 500 have joined Dialpad's mission to kill the desk phone, including Uber, Motorola Solutions, Vivint Solar, Xero, Financial Times, Betterment, PagerDuty, Stripe, Quora, and others. Dialpad is funded by some of the world's best-recognized investors including Amasia, Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Section 32, Softbank and Work-Bench. To learn more about our mission to kill the desk phone, visit dialpad.com and follow @DialpadHQ on Twitter or like us on Facebook.
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