Telecoms challenges in education: Three signs it’s time for change

Challenge 1: Overwhelmed staff

Ever find your reception staff swamped with an endless stream of calls? It’s not just stressful for them, but it also leads to lacklustre communication and a frustrating experience for parents. Why is this happening, you wonder? This situation often stems from outdated communication systems that insist on constant human intervention and real-time efforts.

Solution: By opting for a modern system alternative, like VoIP for education, you give your receptionists access to tools like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and auto-attendants to automate your contact channels and divert specific inquiries to dedicated mailboxes. This can alleviate the burden on reception staff, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks and face-to-face interactions.

Challenge 2: Wasted time and productivity

With just one hour per lesson to re-focus and engage your students, it’s easy for time to slip away and for productivity to take a hit. Especially if your school is relying on a collection of disparate applications and sluggish, unreliable internet. The fallout can be disruptive to learning, leaving classrooms restless, teachers frustrated, and valuable learning opportunities slipping through your fingers. So, what’s the deal? Recent research by 8×8 reveals that a whopping 59% of educational institutions are still juggling a mishmash of applications that create inefficiencies in the learning experience as teachers and students hop from one application to the next. You might have initially invested in these tools to adapt to new trends and requirements, but the truth is you’re still burning time with manual processes because these solutions simply aren’t working together.

Solution: Investing in a unified communication system that consolidates various applications and ensures reliable, fast internet connectivity is crucial. Such systems streamline processes, reduce manual work, and foster a more productive and engaging learning environment.

Challenge 3: Unnecessary pressure on teachers

Have you noticed your teachers feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and unfulfilled? Maybe you’ve been experiencing a higher turnover than usual, and a struggle in filling open positions? The likely cause: your teachers are doing everything but what they’re employed to do, and that’s teaching.

Due to disparate applications or a lack of technology in general, teachers spend more time on administrative tasks than actually teaching, taking the focus away from fostering meaningful learning experiences, facilitating growth and nurturing teacher-student relationships. Teachers find themselves juggling a multitude of growing responsibilities, from administrative work and assessments to collecting and organising class materials and engaging with parents. And unfortunately, there’s currently no efficient system in place to tackle these administrative tasks, and technology hasn’t been optimally harnessed to lighten their workload.

But that’s where we come in.