Future Voice teaches academy trust about true dedication to customer service

Pathfinder Schools’ purpose is built on a culture of collaboration between staff, schools and pupils, focused on creating locally-centred schools that know each other well and support each other’s growth.

Pathfinders’ on-premise 3CX solution, powering the entire 10-school Trust’s communications, was located at one of the Trust’s schools. If that school had a power or connectivity outage, it would cause the entire 10-School Trust’s communications to grind to a halt, causing understandable concern.

Plus, the cost of maintaining and updating the existing PBX was rising, prompting Craig Dye, Pathfinders’ Director of IT, to explore strategies for transitioning the system to the Cloud.

However, the Trust only had a limited number of opportunities throughout the year to transition out of term time, and Craig did not want to go it alone, given the complexity of migrating a multi-site system that connected more than 500 staff and thousands of pupils!

Having spoken to its EDU-focused IT Distributor, Stone Group, Future Voice was recommended as a top-tier telecoms partner that would be able to meet the incredibly short window to deliver the transition, only having a week (over Half-term) to enact the change.

By the time Craig reached out and the contract was signed, Future Voice had only two weeks to design the solution and get it ready for deployment. Then, the team would have one week to implement and test the solution seamlessly during a term break so that staff, pupils and parents wouldn’t even realise the migration had happened once they returned.

Future Voice’s expert technical and engineering team quickly went to work, creating backups of the legacy system and migrating all configurations and licences to the newly hosted 3CX solution, creating a replica of each of the school’s calling workflows in the cloud.

This also required performing firmware and software updates across the Trust’s computers and desk phones to bring all the handsets and desktop computers into compatibility with the Cloud-based service.

Then, they worked with Craig to establish and document a Disaster Recovery plan and configuration to ensure all sites would have an established process should they suffer a connectivity issue.

The entire process was project-managed via online tools and regular calls, and Craig had priority access to the team, ensuring timelines were achieved and that good communication practices could be maintained throughout all phases. Not only did this enable Craig to update himself whenever the need arose, but it also helped FV solve potentially critical issues quickly.

“We had calls every few days to catch up on developments and the team was always available whenever we had an urgent question, for example, the engineering team helped us ensure firewall ports were properly adjusted for the change. The entire process was managed impeccably, and I felt the Trust was in safe hands from beginning to end.”
– Craig Dye, Director of IT, Pathfinders

The deployment went without a hitch. Each site was rigorously tested on deployment day to ensure lines worked as expected. Not a single member of staff noticed a difference in the communications system, and that lack of feedback proved the quality of Future Voice’s planning and implementation.

The new cloud-based solution, as well as Future Voice’s recommendations for Pathfinder’s Disaster Recovery Plan, delivers an additional level of resilience for the Trust’s schools, derisking the Trust by ensuring that calls can continue to be facilitated, even in the case of a connectivity outage at any site.

Future Voice’s technical team also continues to monitor call traffic to ensure all handsets and users work as expected and that each site’s connectivity has the bandwidth to support all the calls coming in and out of the schools.

Furthermore, impressed by Future Voice’s dedication and support, Craig and the team are reviewing each site’s connectivity, cybersecurity and CCTV solutions to ensure the Trust is getting the best value for money and that all sites are entirely futureproofed from the upcoming 2025 Switch Off.

“From the outset, we understood they knew what they were doing. The team’s technical proficiency settled our concerns early on, and they’ve delivered on everything we asked of them, so we can’t wait to see how else they can help us maximise the value we see from our other IT and comms services.”
– Craig Dye