Any student who has taken a school assessment exam in recent years has probably encountered NWEA’s work, even if they’ve never heard the name. More than 9,500 schools, districts, and education agencies in more than 145 countries use the nonprofit’s cloud-based testing software to administer assessment exams and track their students’ progress.
With so many students and teachers using its software, NWEA’s call center is the lifeblood of the company. Unfortunately, their legacy, on-premises call center solution offered no failover, which was unacceptable. “For an organization administering tests for a million students during peak times, we couldn’t afford the risk that a call center outage at HQ would leave our entire support staff unavailable to the teachers and school administrators who rely on us.” says Marc Junker, NWEA’s Director of IT.
As the company began to assess its call center challenges, NWEA also discovered a seemingly unrelated challenge: Its 1,200 employees/contractors were using many different communication apps, which created inefficiencies, frustration, and needless costs. “To give just one example, our staff used several different chat apps,” says Junker. “Almost half of our employees work remotely, so this just happened organically. But it meant employees trying to reach their coworkers might try one chat app, then realize those people weren’t using that app, so they’d have to try others to find them. This led to a lot of wasted time, lost productivity, and frustration.”
As the company began to investigate solutions to these two issues, they discovered that a single cloud communications solution—from RingCentral—could not only resolve both problems but also build a powerful unified solution.