Schools up and down the country had to work unbelievably hard during the pandemic to educate the nations kids and keep mums and dads in the loop as they tried to home school – it’s been relentless! One of the key learning points from the last few years has been the absolute pivotal importance of having a robust, agile and flexible telephone communications system each and every day, let alone during an unprecedented crisis.
We know from our clients that those schools who had invested in comms pre pandemic, fared better than those who didn’t. As the UK learns to live with Covid amongst us, it’s likely that schools will be dealing with mass staff absences (at one point during March one in ten teachers were off sick or isolating due to Covid).
In increasingly tight fiscal circumstances, it can seem like the right call to soldier on with an antiquated phone system that’s ‘doing the job’ rather than investing in upgrading, but this is simply not true. Saving money now will likely cost you more in the short, medium and long term.
Having a speedy, flexible, up to date communications system will help to make sure you can communicate effectively with staff, parents and students, so now’s a great time to check whether your existing system can do just that.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Are dedicated phone lines important to you?
Members of staff have to deal with a high volume of calls at the best of times and this has grown significantly over the past couple of years. That said, there will be some commonality to the queries coming through – would it help parents, pupils and teachers to have dedicated phone lines for recurring questions? What about an absence line? Having a system that directs callers to the right place quickly makes an enormous difference.
Are some staff still working at home – how are you communicating with them?
Staff may well be self-isolating and teaching remotely or you may have kids home-schooling whilst they’re poorly – how are you communicating with those not on site?
Remote workers may benefit from a VoIP handset they can plug into a router to have instant access to your internal network, contacts and colleagues or use the handy mobile app or cloud system to give them the same communication experience as being at school.
Are you keeping parents on hold for a long time?
If so, you could you benefit from an auto attendant feature that allows your system to identify the reason for incoming calls and use a comprehensive menu system to divert them to the most appropriate destination?
It’ll reduce wait times and frustration for callers and is a standard part of our phone systems that proves useful time and time again.
Would your team benefit from closer working with ‘Hunt Groups’?
A hunt group will allow one incoming call to ring on multiple lines, giving a team of appropriate staff the option of answering and reducing pressure on a single teammate. It helps spread the workload between colleagues rather than relying on one person to be on the end of the phone.
An up to date VoIP system can only help improve your communications across staff, pupils and parents now and will serve you well in the face of whatever the future holds. It’s one of the very best things you can do to support your school’s communications going forwards.
We can audit your existing system and recommend a fantastic solution. Contact the team at Equations on 01237 420010 to discuss.
