Transcription
Hey everyone, uh welcome to Fleet Week. I hope you had a great session this morning.
Uh this session is futureproofing campus communications for enhanced outcomes. Uh we're going to be talking about how to leverage uh unified communications in Teams, Zoom or WebEx, doesn't matter which platform you're using to uh create a a smarter campus, to create a more connected campus, and to drive outcomes in higher education.
Um you know, communications today has changed dramatically for students, for faculty and staff, and it's never changing back. Um you know there was some thought that in 2020 when everything had to go remote is this temporary? Is this the new future? Uh then as we came out of the pandemic and you know in the in the business world return to office actually was preceded by you know return to campus as students started coming back to campus.
Um but what does the future look like? And the future is radically different than the past or even some of some elements of the present because there are still a lot of dependences on legacy systems to facilitate communications among uh students, faculty and staff. You know, when we think about the challenges of, you know, these three constituencies communicating, collaborating with each other, it really starts by boiling down the fact that, you know, just a a decade ago, we were dependent on an entirely different set of quote unquote channels.
Um, you know, universities really had adopted the innovation of email. Uh, physical bulletin boards were still out there for students as they were on campus to learn about different things. and legacy phone systems were commonplace for um you know faculty uh to be in their offices collaborating with researchers with students with admin uh each student had a an analog phone line in their dorm rooms uh you know that has slowly started to recede but today's uh users all constituencies across the campus not just you know the the often vilified millennials and and their their younger counterparts.
Um, everyone is a digital native. We're all using digital channels to communicate in addition to voice channels. And what's increasingly coming into focus is that a lot of the campus infrastructures that have been built and deployed over the past decade are not ready and cannot support this expanding surface area where communications are happening.
Um, there's a ton of fragmentation. um you've got these disparit systems that were adopted tactically to patch a need, you know, so all of a sudden my uh my faculty needs to communicate with students via text messaging. We go out and try and find a solution or we don't find a solution and then we uh have the introduction of consumer grade services. So, you know, faculty are trying to use their cell phones or they're not communicating with students because they don't want to give their cell phone number up for good reasons. Fragmentation is creating a series of disconnected tools that users uh ad administrators and faculty are wrestling with in trying to serve students and communicate with uh third parties, researchers and such.
This has created a ton of inefficiency. Um, you know in the past there was a focus on integrating back-end systems. So this way we created a unified front on the front end. But somewhere over the last five to seven years um integration has given way to mediation that's moved out to the end users requirement. You know think of messaging integration. You know in the past you had one instant messaging platform I had a different instant messaging platform. We could uh message each other across it. In today's environment I have a folder of messaging apps. So depending on who I'm communicating with, I may have a different application. We're pushing a lot of the uh onus and overhead onto the end users and app switching fatigue is real. The amount of uh apps that are required in order to get work done has just continued and continues to explode on the end users and it's having with it a real impact to productivity.
But then some of the things that are surfacing or that are swimming just under the surface that don't necessarily get the attention that they need is this also this fragmentation this inefficiency is creating real downstream impacts on accessibility gaps. uh better supporting folks that need uh access to, you know, different channels to tools within the channels to better serve as we start to move into this more digital native footprint.
Um, we can better serve a lot of these accessibility gaps. But the challenge is if the infrastructure doesn't support it and if you import consumer grade services without the over uh overseas from a compliance and security perspective. So, you know, legacy systems are really the villain in this story.
You know, Teams, Zoom, and then WebEx now are really the right choice for uh campuses that are looking to enhance their communications infrastructures because these platforms are so much more than just a video meeting uh system or just a messaging system. They really have the option to consolidate all of the leading communications needs that you have. under one roof. So this creates a super app for the end users. You can integrate all of the different capabilities into these platforms. So this way I'm creating less work for faculty and staff to use to communicate and collaborate with each other to collaborate with third parties like research or to better serve the students that um we all exist to educate.
And and the big key is by eliminating the chasms between fragmented infrastructure, you're also really zipper zippering up the potential vulnerabilities that you have from a compliance and security perspective. So these are the platforms that really are designed for serving students uh enabling faculty and empowering administrators to better serve all of the different um needs that they have across these uh capabilities.
Uh we talked about accessibility and inclusion. Um digital first platforms are designed to better serve student needs across whatever needs they are. you know, the ability to provide live captions, AI generated transcripts, multil- language support are tearing down the barriers to education and empowering a more uh open community for students to better learn how they learn instead of forcing them to try and keep up uh with potential, you know, shortfalls in the in the platforms. And now with asynchronous learning options, you can expand your student body because you're not beholden to not just location. You know, remote learning solutions have empowered the uh ability to communicate across distance, but now you're also spanning time. I can deal with time zones. I don't need the students to come to a real-time lecture, which necessitates they be in the same time zone and potentially in the same location. With asynchronous learning now, you can better serve students no matter where they are, and you can expand your student body even further.
You know, the stats on the bottom really tell the story. 98% of students find captions helpful for learning. So, this way, as you're going, you can actually hear these things. Uh 70% of first generation students prefer fully asynchronous online courses. My wife is one of them. She took a ton of online courses as she was pursuing her higher education and being able to uh operate in an asynchronous environment helped her complete her degree and go back into the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom for decades.
Uh security and compliance is crucial and this is an unseen uh but rapidly elevating invisibility need for campuses. Higher education institutions are rapidly becoming targets for malware, for ransomware, and a host of other violations. So having the ability to create end-to-end communications that are fully encrypted uh and not just communications but file sharing creating role-based access controls are becoming crucial for security or for universities and institutions to better protect themselves uh against all of the riffraff and potential dangers that are out uh on the internet lurking waiting to pounce.
But the number one key benefit for a lot of institutions is the ability to lower your overall costs. You know, we're all looking to do more with less. And by migrating from legacy infrastructure into modern communications uh solutions, you can dramatically lower your costs. Uh your total cost of ownership can go down by over 140%. There's a document uh you can find the link on the slide. The Microsoft uh Teams phone migration was uh created by Forester. Take a look at this guide. It really walks you through all of the pieces and how you can realize tremendous cost savings in your telecom budget by simply treating voice as no longer a thing that you buy a standalone platform, but instead a feature that you turn on in the platforms you're already using.
This one quote on the screen really stood out at me. We're looking at an incremental cost reduction per user of about 40%. Or in hard dollars about $20 per user per month. Do the math. You know how many users you have. Imagine saving $20 per user per month on your telecom expense. What would that do to your bottom line? what could that do to help you further lean in and serve students in a more factual way, a more u valuable way.
Um, so the key benefits are there. You increase student engagement, you can uh increase uh faculty uh efficiencies across different use cases uh that we're going to talk about in a second. You can drive a stronger institutional reputation because now you can communicate with students, faculty and alumni and administrators all on the modern channels that we all communicate in our personal lives with and ultimately you can do it while driving costs out of the organization which is the the trifecta of solutions and and benefits.
So let's talk about use cases. How can you apply communications in collaboration across the different use cases in the uh in your institution? Let's start with faculty research and collaboration. Today, faculty and researchers typically tend to either leverage legacy infrastructure where it can keep up but also start to bleed into non uh deployed infrastructure, non-managed infrastructure. to paraphrase Jurassic Park, technology finds a way which can lead to vulnerabilities in compliance.
Uh you may start seeing people move to platforms that have things like dissolvable messages or consumer grade services like WhatsApp because the infrastructure deployed by the facult by the uh institution doesn't keep up with this infra this infrastructure. It creates security vulnerabilities potentially because some of these applications aren't necessarily encrypted. you lose the ability to create uh role-based permissions. Uh you you lose the ability to create um chain of custody where needed and other things.
Um, it really gives you a challenge. Whereas these communications platforms when properly configured give you the ability to have all of these tools in one application. So the faculty and the researchers with them have a more mediated way to communicate. So the faculty have the ability to send and receive text messages. They have the ability to communicate via WhatsApp in a secure and supported way. They have the ability to communicate via voice or video and share and produce uh content via collaboration all within one application that is properly deployed, managed and maintains compliance by your university's IT infrastructure.
So the the ability of consolidation provides outstanding benefits for faculty. It gives you the ability to not have to have a million different apps based off what researcher you're talking to. You now have those mediation points of I can just text with you the the lowest common denominator, SMS, MMS. I can communicate via WhatsApp. Shortly, we'll be adding uh Apple IME messages.
And we'll be adding uh rich communication services, RCS. So, you'll have the ability to communicate on standardized channels. Your researchers may be using their cell phones, they may using a different service, but we've created that back office like integration. So, we're not only increasing productivity on the faculty side because now they're not dealing with the app switching fatigue. They're not introducing security vulnerabilities by importing consumer grade services or third party unmanaged products, but you're also doing this in a way that streamlines the workflow overall.
Uh campuswide communications increases by leveraging these platforms. So when you have urgent um you know alerts that you need to send out even beyond the um the the one that springs to everybody's mind around you know warning about a a potential violent event or anything else but just something as simple as uh there's an event happening at a certain location on the university and we want to either notify the the campus body or uh alert the campus body to avoid that area because of congestion.
Um, the ability to not only send those outbound calls but also not be dependent on channels that may be ignored by parts or all of that student and faculty body. Um, you know email is becoming less and less of an attention channel for younger and younger generations. They're looking at more real-time communications channels like text and whatnot. So having all of these capabilities built into a common platform gives you the ability to increase uh campuswide uh communications because now you're communicating with users on a personal basis based on how they want to be reached and how they want to communicate with the university or institution on the channels that they leverage in a supportable way.
You can also speed up and increase communications among different campuses because let's face it, we're all increasingly moving to a multicampus environment. As uh faculty and as staff move from campus to campus, the ability to model your communications after your email becomes crucial. You know, with email, we have one email address that synchronizes across all of the devices that we use. No matter where we happen to be, no matter what network we happen be connected to, that one email address is where you reach me at. But with voice, every unique device, every unique location usually carries with it a unique phone number. But with these communications platforms having that full centralization, I now have one number reach no matter where I happen to be, no matter what device I happen to be using, no matter what network it happens to be connected to. And I'll take this a step further. No matter how I want to communicate, whether that's uh via voice or via digital channels, one number reach becomes crucial and the ability to do a lot of that without the need for an app to embed directly into the cell phone the business phone number. So I don't have to open an app to make that outbound call. I just make the call on myself becomes really, really crucial.
Technologies built into these platforms without having to expand into a true contact center give you the ability to further enhance uh student services and support. You can start to deliver virtual services using what you would commonly think of the video meeting platforms.
Um, and 90% of students uh see there's an increase in the in consumption of student services when you offer those. But also take it a step further. You can now offer textbased communications with student services. So, um, you know, I can I can potentially reach out for counseling, um, or career guidance, not by a scheduled synchronous time where I've got to be there at a certain moment, but via asynchronous channels like, uh, messaging inside of the platforms or whether external channels. Your students may not necessarily even have a seat on the communications platform, but they have a cell phone. So if they can communicate via SMS, MMS or WhatsApp or shortly Apple Messages for Business, those can be ingested by student services. And now you're creating another uh communications thread to those students to better serve them in the ways that they want to be served when they want to be served on the channels that they want to be served on.
Um, it also can help your IT uh team. So you can start to streamline the amount of route uh technical transactional tasks by deploying I AI agents. So they can handle routine uh requests things like password resets or uh checking on status to see if a platform is updated. They can automate ticket uh resolutions so they can streamline the ticketing process. They can provide updates without having to have a human involved in those transactional like requests.
Um, voice and SMS empower students to get the answers to the questions that they need without having to wait on overburdened uh staff to provide that those kind of transactional answers. Things like conversational AI, the ability to send and receive SMS messages uh not just for the communications channel but also ticket updates uh becomes crucial. And what this does is it frees up the human staff to better work on the strategic, the complicated, the time-sensitive needs for students and faculty and administrators.
Um, so being able to do um, you know, remote support via voice and video in a single common platform can be crucial. And again, the ability to support those digital channels with students, with faculty to just check in, is this working, is this not working, really becomes a key benefit of leveraging a a truly unified communications platform.
The last use case that I want to talk about is one that is often underthought of and that is alumni outreach. You know, we talk a lot when we talk about higher education around, you know, the three onampus constituencies, your faculty, your students, and your admin. But alumni outreach becomes crucial and by blending all of these services into a common supported platform. Now your alumni outreach becomes more efficient. You can communicate with your alumni via those outbound calling campaigns using this infrastructure and it's got the call recording. It's got analytics to measure performance, but you can also reach out to alumni and engage alumni via digital channels.
Um, we're all on the go. who are all dealing with uh a ton of calls that we don't necessarily want to answer. Having the ability to reach out and just send a quick text message to alert alumni of a campus event, uh a town hall, or you know, a fundraising campaign will help you create more successes in those spaces.
So let's talk about migration challenges and migration considerations as you're thinking about moving from this legacy infrastructure into a premise a a brand new uh collaboration environment. Some of the the paths that you want to think about start with the actual transition and understanding that this is a journey not a jump. in order to ensure maximum uh uptake, you want to follow some of these steps and starts with creating a pilot program for early adoption.
You know, there's this concept in in marketing of the customer adoption bell curve. You know, new products always find their innovators and early adopters before going into the mass market. And to to use an analogy, think of this like the iPhone. your your your innovators were the people that camped out in front of the stores the day before. They've never touched the new iPhone. They don't know anybody that's got the new iPhone, but they want to be first. They want to be the first to use it. They want to create that feedback loop through using it that enhances the product itself.
They know there potentially could be bugs in the very first releases that come out. They they don't care. They want to be first. There's that piece to it. The innovate, I'm sorry, the early adopters are a close cousin. They don't camp out in front of the store, but they go on opening day. You know, they they have their pre-order. They're they're not camping out. They're walking into the store. They're picking up their device. Just like innovators. They don't know anybody that's had one of these devices. No one has ever touched one of these devices. They know there could potentially be uh stability issues or whatnot. But again, they want to be the first to use these devices. And what happens is as these user constituencies walk around with their iPhones, all of a sudden we start to see people, hey, you know, that's the the guy I always know has the latest and greatest, these people in the majority. They're influenced by these uh early adopters. Hey, is that the new iPhone? What does it do? Can you show it to me? What what do you think? What new features? And it guides and increases adoption. And this is no different when you're talking about deploying consolidated technology. Find your early adopters, find your innovators, find those influencers within your campus communities that you can uh get into a pilot program, create a feedback loop with them. So this way it can guide um your further deployments out and then they become influencers out into the rest of the campus. from a user by user perspective, you'll start to see that start to snowball. Then it'll move into a department by department perspective, campus by campus perspective once people start hearing about, you know, this new capability and what it can do and what it can uh what it can um achieve from a trusted source out in the field. You'll start to see this happen.
And this is the second key. Think transition, not transformation. At the end of the day, do this in small pieces to make sure that you're increasing your adoption rates and adopting the entirety of the platform, not just a fragment of it. The days of cutting over on Friday nights and coming in on Mondays and users embracing onetenth of what a system can do really are inefficient in today's world. You want to create a world where these tools are intuitive. We want people using more and more of those features.
to that point. Um, you want to ease user adoption. You want to create, uh, knowledge transfers. You want to, um, create built forpurpose solutions for those users, but you also want to facilitate those users as they're kind of, um, transitioning over, giving them the ability to repurpose some of the hardware that they may be depending on, like desk phones. If uh, you're a professor and you've got office hours and having that feedback loop doesn't end with your um, your early adopters. create that feedback loop as you expand your deployment to the rest of the enduser community. So this way they're a breast of new innovation that's coming down. They're sharing how they're leveraging this innovation uh because you often find things that you don't necessarily think about upfront. People are creative, people think of different use cases. You want to popularize those use cases across campus. So create that feedback loop to ensure modern value as people are uh you know sharing knowledge among each other of how they're adopting these things. And it gives you an output for when new innovation comes to these platforms.
Because unlike any other product that you buy in your life, uh you buy a brand new car, you drive it off the lot. That first day is the best day. It all goes downhill from there where you know the new car smell fades, the kids leave stuff all over the seats, you know, the car gets dirty. The first day is the best day. With these platforms, because they're cloud-based and because of the subscriptionbased model, the first day is the worst day. These things are only going to continue to get better with innovation and AI is moving so rapidly. Creating that feedback loop gives you an ability to popularize out this new capability to the user base and then create that loop where people start adopting it, using it in creative ways and sharing that among uh the user base.
So there's a lot of things to think about as you're considering a move from uh legacy to uh modern infrastructure.
So then the question is all right well why should I use Cypio? I how can Cypio help my institution leverage all of this and transition in a supportable way? You know, at Cypio, we are design are built to make calling, texting, faxing, and other capabilities easy, fast, and flexible inside of these leading platforms, Teams, Zoom, and WebEx.
Um, we believe technology has just gotten really complicated and really slow. And what we want to do is we want to make it fast to get started. Our platform gives you the ability to have a shopping experience that's as easy as uh buying a pair of shoes on Amazon. It's fully automated, so you don't have the army of technicians uh racking and stacking things and you know whacking away at a keyboard. Because we're fully automated, you can turn on new service faster than you can activate a a new Netflix subscription.
We want to make it easy to manage and the way that we do that is through the use of our intuitive online dashboard. You know, many institutions may actually adopt Team Zoom and Webex. So, having a centralized management portal, kind of your mission control to manage users on all of those platforms to even manage the phone services that aren't on those platforms, things like cell phones, fax lines, you know, uh uh standalone phone lines for security systems. Being able to manage that telecom inventory in a single pane of glass makes it super easy to keep all of your communications tamed and under control.
You also want to be able to support users wherever they happen to be. And with Cypio, we give you the simplicity of one hand to shake, one bill to pay service. We can offer coverage in over 80 countries around the world. So, if you have remote campuses, if you have uh FA if you have um admin out in the field doing uh recruiting, doing uh student outreach, you have the ability to service them without having to go out and find standalone providers to do that.
And ultimately, reliability is key. We want to be reliable forever and building reliability is no accident. Our platform is Azure native. It's deployed nine different Azure regions. Within each region, we're deployed in a high availability model. So everything's duplicated and we can fail over between three zones within each region. So that means this is a carriergra platform that you do not have to worry about. We offer a 59s contractual SLA which means no more than five minutes of unexpected outage time per year and that is a guarantee from us.
We also empower you to migrate at your pace. So you have the ability to either go all the way to teams phone. So you if you're ready to retire that legacy infrastructure altogether, our uh connect solution gives you the ability to do that with no infrastructure required. But if you're in the middle of a contract on your hardware, if you haven't depreciated the last investments you made in servers, you have the ability to use Cypio Bridge. We can deliver voice services to your premise-based infrastructure and then we can add uh additional capabilities to your collaboration environments. text messaging, fax, and others.
We're making it easier than ever to adopt these services through the use of the Cypio plans. Cypio Lightite for $4 per month in the US gives you a calling plan with shared minutes and it gives you a shared text messaging allowance as well for your university to try. Cypio Plus upgrades the text messaging to now unlimited text messaging inbound outbound per user. You can also set up shared text messaging boxes so student services can have one number that is reachable by students and it's monitored by multiple people in the department. Cypio Pro gives you the calling and text messaging. It also adds in call analytics. So if you have users that are providing certain services and you've got call cues delivering to them, great value to understand what's happening and what's happened. How many people are logged in? How many people are on the phone? how many calls came in, who answered the most calls, as well as Cypio Care. This is our managed services. So, if you ever need changes made to your call cues or to your auto attendants or to your users, Cypio Care has you covered. It's included with Cypio Pro. It's available as an option for Cypio Plus or Cypio Light. So, this way you can free your IT staff from having to manage the telephone system. You can have us do that for you with a quick and easy solution.
We also offer more services and we give you the flexibility to turn the dials exactly how you need them. So we've built this really robust library of services. Connect and bridge we've already talked about. Those are our voice services. We also have CPIO text messaging. It's bundled into our plans, but it's also available as a standalone service. Supports SMS, MMS, RCS, WhatsApp for business, and soon it will be supporting Apple messages for business. We've got call center solutions. Cypio Pro includes analytics. But if you want to record your calls, we've got a tool for that. If you have a full-blown contact center that you need servicing and you want to have it fully integrated into Teams, our partnership with Solgari gives you the ability to have an AI powered contact center that's pre-integrated with premes ready to go in hours, not months. And we've got a whole host of other services.
I'd like to end this session by sharing with you a case study. So Roseman University is an example of a institution with multiple campuses that sought to modernize their fragmented standalone systems into a truly unified solution operating within Microsoft Teams. They had a bunch of Cisco call managers deployed at different campuses. They had fewer and fewer resources from an IT perspective. And what they decided was to find those cost savings by migrating from premise to Microsoft Teams phone. They took advantage of discounted pricing on the Teams platform. And what they've done through that transition is they've been able to quickly and rapidly modernize. A lot of those migration considerations were things that Roseman had adopted. They found their early innovators. They found their adopters. They found those influencers in the region. And then that created a momentum stream for adoption.
One of the challenges that they faced was faculty that wasn't quite ready to let go of their hardware like their desk phones. So their IT director Jeremy challenged them and said, "Give it 30 days or give it 90 days. You're using speaker phone on your phone all the time anyway. Just use your computer for it." They removed hundreds of devices and they only replaced about 50 of them as they came back. So that lowers their hardware support burden. They've now got backup inventory. They were able to repurpose the phones using standardized SIP protocols. So they didn't have to go out and buy new hardware. But simply by challenging the end users, give it 90 days, but we'll also give you this if you if you're not happy, we'll put your device back out. It really shows the power of modernization by by creating this migration path that creates those influencers, shows people what's possible and shows them the value of consolidating these platforms.
This has been futureproofing campus communications for enhanced outcomes. If you have any questions, please visit our website cypio.io, reach out to your business partner or talk to your CPIO account manager.