BACKGROUND
Located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Episcopal School is an independent, college preparatory school that has been enrolling students in grades kindergarten through 12 since 1965. Episcopal School has earned national recognition, becoming the first school in the Baton Rouge area to be twice recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a School of Excellence. Hallmarks of an Episcopal education are individual attention—average class size is 15—and an emphasis on self-esteem. National test scores indicate that Episcopal’s students are ahead of their peers in written and oral expression. Each year, 10 to 20 percent of the graduating class is recognized by the National Merit Scholarship organization.

THE CHALLENGE
As part of Episcopal School’s commitment to excellence, the school has actively sought to integrate technology into its classrooms and administrative structure. “Over the years, we have expanded our networking capabilities to give every teacher and administrator a computer with Microsoft Outlook® installed on it through which they can access their email messages,” said Buddy Anderson, business manager at Episcopal.

Up until this year, the school had been using the AVST standard voicemail system. “The voicemail system had served us well for a long time,” Anderson said, “but we really needed to find a way to give our teachers, who do not have phones in their classrooms, immediate access to their voicemail messages without having to leave their classrooms.”

Anderson explained that without access to voice messages in their classrooms, teachers had to crowd into faculty lounges during breaks and jostle for a turn on the telephone to check their messages, causing stress for themselves and strain on the voicemail system. Alternatively, teachers could wait until the end of the day to retrieve voice messages, resulting in delayed responses to messages from parents or co-workers.

“Our options were to either drop a telephone into every classroom or to integrate a unified messaging solution which would make a teacher’s voicemail messages accessible from the computer already at his or her own desk,” Anderson said. “Putting a telephone in each room was out of the question. It would cost a small fortune and cause untimely disruptions to the learning environment in the room. Consequently, we set out looking for a unified messaging solution.”

THE SOLUTION
Anderson did not have to look far. In order to make the implementation of a unified messaging solution as smooth and cost-efficient as possible, the school wanted to build upon its investment in the existing CallXpress® voicemail system.

“We were extremely pleased to discover that we could simply extend our existing CallXpress system to include unified messaging,” Anderson said. “CallXpress is designed to make voice, email and fax messages alike accessible by either the telephone or PC. This was exactly what our teachers needed to allow them to stay on top of all their communications without leaving their classroom and students.”

Also a critical factor in the school’s decision to install CallXpress was the fact that CallXpress integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook. “If CallXpress and Outlook had not been compatible, it would have been a deal breaker. We’re a Microsoft shop, and we’re going to stay that way,” Anderson said. “We were simply not interested in spending the budget -- nor the time in training our staff -- on a new software program to access messages. As it is, with the two programs integrated, it’s just wonderful. Using the forms that pop up when we listen to a new voice message, we can take notes on calls and set reminders in Outlook as we check voicemail, rather than having to keep track of the calls on paper.”

Episcopal now has CallXpress installed and networked on 100 of its computers -- giving every teacher, administrator and staff member the ability to access and respond to their voice, fax and email messages from their PC or from a telephone. VoiceXpress® in Baton Rouge, a solutions consultant and AVST business partner, worked with Anderson to achieve the upgrade. Everyone has been extremely pleased with the results.

“As an independent school, we provide a high level of service to parents. With CallXpress’ help, we have set the expectation that parents can leave a voice message or send an email for a teacher and the message will be received and responded to in a timely manner,” Anderson said. “With CallXpress, parents no longer have to leave voice or fax messages that teachers may not be able to receive until the end of the day, nor leave messages with a secretary who must then track that teacher down on foot.”

“This level of responsiveness to parents is particularly valuable in the lower division classes in which parents may need to communicate with children to coordinate a ride home at the end of the day,” Anderson continued. “For example, if a parent needs to tell their child to ride the bus home with Sally instead of Lucy, all they need to do is leave a voice message in the teacher’s Inbox. Since teachers can now receive those voice messages at their own desk, the message is guaranteed to be received in time to pass it along to the child.”

The implementation of CallXpress has provided significant time saving and eased workloads for the school. “CallXpress has cut back a tremendous workload on division secretaries who are now able to accomplish more tasks in the office using the time they used to spend away from their desks, running up and down halls delivering messages,” said Anderson. “Additionally, by giving teachers the ability to spend less time retrieving and responding to messages, they are better able to do what we pay them to do—which is teach the children and manage classrooms.”

The CallXpress’ fax solution, RightFax Enterprise, is also beneficial to teachers and administrators. The school set up its CallXpress solution to deliver incoming faxes to individual department offices rather than to each teacher, because they are infrequently received. However, every teacher has the ability to send faxes from the PC on their own desktop, which also improves parent-teacher relationships and communication.

“For example, if a parent calls to request their sick child’s assignments for the week, the teacher can simply choose the fax printer from her computer to immediately send the assignments to the parent,” said Anderson.

Episcopal’s foreign language teachers have found a unique application for CallXpress. “We have assigned each language teacher 10 message boxes,” explained Anderson. “These teachers can then record dialogue for the students in boxes one, two and three, and direct their students to call in and listen to that dialogue. The students can then respond with their answers by leaving a voice message in box four. With a little creativity, CallXpress now actually plays a role as a teaching tool in our classrooms!

“CallXpress has been the perfect solution for Episcopal Schools,” Anderson concluded. “From the beginning, CallXpress unified messaging was a hassle-free upgrade and it continues to be extremely reliable—really just taking care of itself. But most significantly, CallXpress has made a huge difference in teachers’ ability to communicate with parents and students. When it comes down to it, people on the outside of the school probably have no idea of the changes we’ve made to our communications system—and they don’t really need to know. All parents need is the confidence we give them, through CallXpress, that when they leave a message, it will be received promptly and acted upon.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (“AVST”) is a leader in the unified communications (“UC”) marketplace uniquely combining the strengths of its world-class messaging platform, CallXpress®, with its speech-enabled call management module, Seneca™, to create a powerful, next-generation unified communications solution. The Company’s products are designed to scale and support organizations of all sizes. For more information please contact us at: www.avst.com or +1.949.699.2300.