From phone calls to roll calls: 3CX has the answer

One of the many benefits offered by 3CX's Phone System is its flexibility. An award-winning platform in its own right, thanks to integrations from the company's trusted partners it can become a turnkey solution to problems facing an entire industry.

In the case we're examining here, that industry is education. In particular, the schools and colleges that need to do far more than answer the phones. Before they can take any action they have to be absolutely certain that the incoming caller is who they say they are – and to check for any safeguarding issues. Only then can they process absences or answer queries.

Now, 3CX partners have a solution to this in the form of a 3CX integration for the education-focused management information systems (MIS) from Arbor, SIMS, isams and Bromcom. In partnership with EdTechPro, Yellowgrid has created a complete solution that 3CX partners can provide to their clients.

We spoke to Craig Graham, founder of Yellowgrid, to find out more about this solution and the advantages it offers schools.

One example problem

One of the biggest challenges facing any school is handling the sheer volume of calls from parents and guardians. Each call needs to be handled efficiently and correctly, and if you're relying on manual systems then those two factors don't go hand in hand. The line could be fuzzy, there might be a language barrier, the school's call handler might simply mishear or mistype a name.

This is where calling line identification, or CLI, comes into play. "Because we're reading in the CLI of the parent, and that CLI is attached to a particular student, picking up the correct record is quick and accurate," said Craig.

Normally, the school receptionist – or whoever is taking the call – would then need to jump around the various sections of the school's MIS to record absences for the different lessons attended by the child that day. Thanks to Yellowgrid's integration with all the most common systems, that becomes a matter of "a few clicks", said Craig.

But it can be even more automated than that. Thanks to 3CX's support for converting speech to text using AI, forward-thinking schools can encourage parents and guardians to leave voicemails which will then be automatically processed.

The 3CX advantage

This level of automation and integration is made possible thanks to the fact that the 3CX Phone System is designed for customization. "3CX is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle in that you can piece it together how you see fit," said Craig. "This allows us to do things like provide solutions specifically for certain verticals, like education, to make 3CX more attractive in that particular market."

This means that 3CX distributors such as Yellowgrid can create custom solutions that solve specific problems, or simply enhance the 3CX offering, which it then offers to resellers. "Once we solve the problem, we then offer these solutions downward through the channel, which will then hopefully hit the end user – in this case, schools and academies and trusts," Craig explained.

Take part of the problem mentioned above, where a school uses a specialist MIS. 3CX is a global company and already provides integrations with popular MIS systems such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. But there are hundreds, thousands of MIS systems out there, many of them hitting specialist verticals such as education. Companies like Yellowgrid, with its team of technical experts who specialise in 3CX, are there to ensure that when resellers implement 3CX they already have a solution in place.

A collaborative story

Craig and his team were already working on an integration for schools when he came across work done by a tech solutions company that specialises in education called EdTechPro. Rather than work separately, Yellowgrid and EdTechPro collaborated to produce turnkey solutions for the different MIS systems.

The division of labour was simple: EdTechPro continued to develop its integration with specialist education MIS systems such as Arbor, and Yellowgrid concentrated on its strength: creating a compelling solution based on automation.

"What we are very good at is the whole automation of deploying 3CX customised for the needs of the end user, so that they don't have to do things like add SIP trunks, add numbers, add extensions, add MAC addresses to devices. All that is automated from end to end through our DevOPs teams."

This means you avoid the manual process of deploying 3CX on a virtual machine or in the cloud; you can even skip the process of choosing the right phones as Yellowgrid, a Fanvil and Yealink distributor, will handle all this for its resellers.

Early successes

Despite being a relatively new product, Craig estimates that over 100 schools have already switched to its latest solution. "We introduced this concept to a small number of 3CX partners who focus within the education sector and they've loved it, the schools have loved it."

A big part of the appeal is that it solves a problem for multi-academy trusts; these days, groups of schools in England are usually run by a trust rather than the local education authority.

"The academy trust wants a single phone system to serve a bunch of local schools, but each of those schools has got its own individual MIS," said Craig. "Our middleware will allow a single 3CX system to connect to multiple MIS systems, so in that way we've solved the problem of academy trusts getting the economies of scale of having a single phone system to serve multiple schools."

As with any development, this isn't finished. In fact, Yellowgrid only added the AI-transcribed voicemail in response to demand from early customers. "That's proven really popular, actually," said Craig.

Any other surprises? "I suppose the only surprise is how well it's been received, because 3CX has got a lot of advantages for education based on its licensing method," he said, referring to the fact that you only pay for the maximum number of simultaneous calls rather than individual phone numbers.

And the opportunities will only grow. Yellowgrid has already noticed more education-focused queries since it started offering the integration, and with many schools stuck on PSTN systems – which will need to be replaced by VoIP by January 2027 at the very latest – he expects this to only increase. Fortunately, migrations can normally be completed during any of the school holidays.

They're also benefiting from schools who jumped early to a VoIP system and haven't had the best experience. "Other schools have fallen foul of adopting the first VoIP platform and finding it not really doing what they were hoping it would do, particularly with the multi-academy trusts."

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