With RingCentral, National Polytechnic College is improving instructor accessibility, staff communication, and the school’s marketing efforts | #customersupport #supporticket

Highlights:

• Instructor accessibility: With RingCentral apps on their laptops and phones, instructors can connect with students from anywhere using their school-assigned numbers.
• Team communication: Using RingCentral’s messaging platform, the school’s employees can chat with each other in real-time, which has improved collaboration.
• Marketing insights: NPCollege’s marketing team uses a RingCentral integration with their CRM to automate SMS messages to prospects and monitor response rates.

A fast-growing school for tomorrow’s allied health professionals

As demand increases for qualified MRI technologists, ultrasound technicians, medical assistants, and other allied health professionals, accredited institutions like National Polytechnic College have seen demand for admissions to their schools increase as well.

Today, in fact, NPCollege is building on the success of its Lakewood, California, campus by constructing a second location in Orange County—with additional plans to add a third Southern California campus soon.

Cloud communications helped improve remote learning during COVID

NPCollege’s senior leadership had signed up for RingCentral’s cloud phone solution several years prior to the 2020 lockdowns to modernize the school’s telephony environment and give instructors more mobility and flexibility.  

Because most of the college’s instruction took place in classrooms on campus, and all staff had desk phones, instructors and support employees continued to rely on the legacy telephony infrastructure for day-to-day communications.

But when the COVID lockdowns went into effect—and mobile communications became a necessity essentially overnight—the operations team acted quickly to ensure everyone at NPCollege had RingCentral’s anywhere, any-device phone and SMS texting capability. 

Charles Mugrdechian, Director of Operations, explains that because NPCollege had RingCentral in place prior to COVID, “We were ahead of the curve when the lockdowns started, which meant we were able to continue educating our students and supporting our staff with minimal disruption.”

With RingCentral, this vocational college continued educating tomorrow’s health professionals during the lockdowns

The college-wide RingCentral rollout was quick and simple, Charles notes. His team added digital phone numbers in the school’s RingCentral account for all instructors and support staff. Then they showed all employees how to access RingCentral’s soft phone app for their laptops and the mobile app for their personal cell phones. 

With these apps, NPCollege’s instructors and administrative staff can now communicate with students, by phone or text, from anywhere—without having to share their personal phone numbers.  

Thanks to this RingCentral implementation, Charles explains, NPCollege enjoyed a seamless transition to remote instruction during COVID. “If an instructor needed to speak with a student, they could do so from anywhere, using their computer or mobile phone. And if they wanted to update the whole class about an upcoming assignment or exam, they could send an SMS text message from the RingCentral app—again, using their NPCollege number.” 

Discovering more workflow improvements with RingCentral

With RingCentral apps on their computers and mobile phones, NPCollege employees now had another way to connect with each other from anywhere—which was particularly useful while most of the staff were working remotely. As Charles explains, employees began using the built-in messaging platform in their RingCentral app to send each other real-time chats.

“The messaging app is great because it lets us connect immediately with our colleagues without the need for a full phone call. We use RingCentral messaging all the time to send each other short questions or give each other brief updates throughout the day.”

In addition to one-on-one chats, Charles notes, his team is also creating dedicated chat teams to share specific information. “I also created a school-wide team for announcements that affect all staff,” he says. “For example, just this morning, our school email was down. So I sent a quick message to the school-wide team to give everyone a heads-up.”

Giovanni Casillas, Director of Admissions and Marketing, explains that his team is leveraging RingCentral integrations to streamline and improve the school’s marketing and advertising efforts. For example, Giovanni has used a Zapier integration to embed RingCentral into NPCollege’s CRM system, called Keap.

“That integration allows us to automate sending out SMS messages to our leads and prospects. And because those outbound messages and the inbound responses all run through our RingCentral environment, I can monitor and analyze our marketing campaigns’ success rates using RingCentral’s reporting and analytics tools.”

Here’s how Charles sums up his feelings about having RingCentral deployed to all NPCollege staff: “Between the cloud communication tools that let us stay connected from anywhere, and the integrations into our marketing and advertising platforms, I’d say RingCentral is helping NPCollege both to improve our communications today… and helping us grow for the future.”

Originally published Jan 20, 2022