Case Study Global University Systems

Company Background

Global University Systems (GUS) owns and operates one of the world’s most diverse networks of higher education institutions, with over 60,000 students in six countries and a global presence online.

UK-based institutions such as The University of Law, London School of Business and Finance (LSBF), Arden University, University Canada West, the University of Applied Sciences Europe, and the Berlin-based GISMA Business School are part of the group, which owns four universities and a wide network of language, business, and professional schools.

In addition to the UK and Germany, GUS also operates institutions in Canada, Ireland, Israel, and Singapore.

Telephony Challenges

In 2019, net2phone started having discussions with GUS on how we could help them overcome some of their telephony challenges. Below is a brief summary of their setup prior to migrating to net2phone.

• GUS had ~2,500 Skype for Business users set up on a legacy end-of-life platform that was managed by an MSP based in the UK.
  • They had a centralized deployment model using 2 on-premise sessions border controllers (SBCs) in the UK for direct routing for all worldwide university telephony traffic. The 2 SBCs were connected to the local public switched telephone network (PSTN) in the UK (GTT and Gamma) via SIP trunks.
  • GUS was not satisfied with the design, routing all telephony traffic that originated from outside of the UK back to the UK. In addition, the support they were receiving from their managed services provider (MSP) partner and the telephony features that were being offered to them were inadequate.
• GUS was using Anywhere 365 as their main contact center solution integrated with Skype for Business.
  • Inbound customer service calls to the various universities were routed to 550 agents located in India, the Philippines, the UK, Germany, and Canada.
  • Outbound calls were made by the agents to prospective students. They were not happy with the call analytics being offered by Microsoft and the call recording features. They also used a predictive dialer application called Playbooks in their Contact Center integrated with Salesforce to generate sales leads. 
• The inbound / outbound calls were routed over Twilio. They were not happy with the overall termination costs over Twilio or GTT / Gamma, as well as the monthly consolidated bill that they received from their provider for all university brand traffic.
• GUS also had an on-premise SBC in Singapore connected to a local Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) provider in Singapore (Singtel). They were looking to migrate all of their contact center and corporate users in Singapore to a Microsoft Teams cloud solution.

net2phone Solution

Our net2phone solution involved migrating all legacy Skype for Business users to Microsoft Teams and migrating all traffic off of their current on-premise SBCs to our cloud solution.

In order to achieve separate billing for each university brand as well as full network redundancy, net2phone created separate SIP trunks for direct routing connected to dedicated SBCs for each university based on their geographic location (Canada, the UK, Germany, Singapore etc). For the Contact Center traffic, we replaced their Anywhere 365 platform with our uContact, cloud-based Contact Center product. We deployed 20 separate dedicated uContact instances in the cloud for each university brand integrated with Microsoft Teams.

Here is what GUS experienced by implementing our solution:

• Geo-redundancy for all GUS Brands - By removing the single point of failure (UK on-premise SBCs) from the previous GUS deployment, net2phone minimizes their risk of outages. We also deployed multiple SIP trunks in various regions and removed their local UK SIP trunks from routing.

• Improved call routing – We optimized the call routing on all GUS traffic by deploying SBCs in the same region as their MS Teams users. The SIP and RTP traffic was routed to our closest net2phone POPs (US, UK, Hong Kong) minimizing the round-trip latency on the calls. All GUS traffic was no longer being backhauled to the UK only. We also gave them access to our net2phone Global Connect routes, providing them with in-country termination using their local numbers.

• Improved call analytics and separate billing – By creating separate SIP trunks for each GUS university brand, we were able to give them better visibility on the telephony costs per band. We were also able to differentiate their corporate MS Teams telephony traffic from their Contact Center (agent) telephony traffic per band.

• Better call features – One of GUS’ biggest issues was how Microsoft handled call recordings. There was a need for the Contact Center supervisors to be able to search for call recordings based on the agent taking the call as well as the timeframe. By implementing our uContact CCaaS product integrated with Microsoft Teams, we were able to offer GUS an easier and more convenient way of searching for call recordings and offloading call recordings to their storage facilities. We also provided them with customized call reports with an option to integrate their data into our AI platform for deeper analytics if needed.

• Cost Saving – There was a significant cost saving for GUS after migrating their traffic to our telephony solution. GUS now also benefits from savings on support and maintenance contacts, SIP licensing fees, data center co-location costs, equipment costs, and termination costs.

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