Despite the team’s initial concerns that migrating would take longer than the twelve months they had, the migration only took seven months to complete. That’s 40% faster than they’d budgeted for the transition. They didn’t even have to do much training for their employees. “We thought that that was going to be kind of traumatic,” Silvina said. “But the users adapted. It was fast and furious, and we needed that on purpose. We didn't want people to live in two tools for an extended period of time.”
The general experience was overwhelmingly positive, and employees quickly adapted to Zoom Phone, Zoom Meetings, and Zoom Team Chat as their primary communication methods. Slivina and her team even offer support channels in Team Chat channels for employees to help each other troubleshoot common problems in their line of work. It’s transformed how they communicate and provided new ways to work together.
“The tool is very forgiving on operating in a network that is less than perfect,” Silvina said. “It can sustain latency, it can sustain packet loss, it doesn’t need much bandwidth.”
Considering the disruption of switching services, Silvina and her team found that some surprising Zoom Workplace features had quickly become favorites. For example, people were thrilled that they could easily mask and block calls from their own devices instead of manually reaching out to the telecommunications team and requesting a block. “That was a highlight feature,” Silvina said. “I didn’t expect that they would be so excited about that!”
BNSF is fully immersed in Zoom Workplace and they also use Zoom Events to expand the reach of their annual Technology Awareness Day. In the past, BNSF was only able to host local high schoolers, but with Zoom Events, they can invite young people from all over the United States to learn about careers in the technology field and challenge attendees to design and develop their own technological solutions to be judged at the event.
On the move with Zoom Rooms
Zoom Phone and Zoom Workplace aren’t the end of BSNF’s story. In collaboration with Zoom Professional Services, they were also able to launch the world’s first-ever Zoom Room on board a moving train.
The leadership team needed a mobile Zoom Room for their regular business trips. They needed to be able to stay connected and work as if they were at their headquarters. Initially, they brought the idea to the Zoom Professional Services team, which set out to renovate a standard business car on one of their trains. “The biggest challenge was the noise,” Silvina said. “Those are very old, traditional cars, so they had to do a lot of crafting to make sure that the noise of the environment wasn’t affecting the call. And it was really good.”

Recently, BNSF worked with Zoom Professional Services again to design and deploy an event full production space for their conference center. The new Zoom Room allows the flexibility to divide the large space into two rooms and choose between the user-friendly Zoom Room Controller or a production mode for a professional team to customize the experience.
Improving company-wide communication for employees in every role
At the core of BNSF’s Zoom experience isn’t just what Zoom Phone and Zoom Workplace can do for them. According to Silvina, it’s much more than that: