All aboard the Zoom train: BNSF Railway’s journey to cloud phones

BNSF implemented a complex migration from on-premises phone to cloud phone — on a tight deadline — improving the employee experience.

BNSF Railway
BNSF Logo
Industry :

Transportation

Company Size :

37,000 employees

Challenges :

Rapid phone migration required, low- or no-reception areas, many employees across large geographic areas

Benefits :

Reduced dialing rules from 60,000+ to less than 200 using Zoom APIs; shifted server maintenance to Zoom; simple migration with assistance from Zoom and CDW; more efficient tools in a single platform

32,500

Miles of railway

99%

Reduction in dialing rules from 60,000+ to less than 200 using Zoom APIs

Over 40%

Faster migration than planned. Budgeted for 12 months, only took seven.

BNSF Railway operates one of the largest freight railroad networks in North America, totaling over 32,500 miles of rail in the western two-thirds of the United States. With more than 7,500 locomotives running along their tracks, crewmembers and employees need reliable voice communication to stay connected.

 

And they had a problem. Their long-used phone solution, Skype for Business, was being discontinued, and they only had a year to migrate over 10,000 phones to a new service. To add even more complexity to the situation, many of these phones were in hard-to-reach locations, in some cases reachable only by snowmobile. Their last phone migration took over four years to accomplish, so the team in charge of the migration was stressed by the time constraints of the new project.

Finding a full-platform solution to a phone problem

 

Getting everything they needed to maintain their expected services would be a high bar to clear. Doing all of that on top of a gigantic transition would be an incredible lift for their team. In addition to 5,400 desk phones and 7,300 shared phones, they maintained over 50 servers in Topeka, Kansas, and Fort Worth, Texas. A cloud phone platform could reduce their server footprint and free up bandwidth from supporting their own infrastructure.

A tightly integrated employee experience

They also needed a platform compatible with the majority of their existing Poly phone hardware. Replacing that many phones that quickly wasn’t possible, and disrupting workflows for their 37,000 employees wasn’t an option.

 

To begin, they made a list of their needs and asked vendors from both traditional on-premises providers and cloud phone platforms to show how they could fill their upcoming service gap. This was a clear opportunity to take a challenging situation and improve their overall communications experience. A standalone phone and voicemail solution wasn’t going to be a solution at all.

 

They wanted messaging and video conferencing that included easy screen sharing. They needed an intuitive dashboard to see which phones weren’t working, traditional phone integration, and a way to manage a complex dial plan. On a specialized note, they needed the option to bring their own carrier, critical for their internal comms to connect to their hand-held radios. They also needed E911 services available.

 

“We needed to have E911 as part of the platform. A lot of these phones are for safety,” Silvina said. “In many cases, it’s hard to get an exact location. It could be a mod post or just latitude and longitude, and we need to make sure that each phone is associated with the location so the emergency responders can get to it.”

 

Out of all of their options, Zoom Workplace provided the best solution for their complex communication needs. Next, they had to migrate thousands of phones and train tens of thousands of employees. All they had to do was stay on track.

A low-touch, cross-country migration

 

To help with the migration process, BNSF enlisted CDW, an already trusted partner they’d worked with before and who was familiar with Zoom Workplace. They got to work and quickly found ways to save time on their migration.

 

One of the most time-saving tools they used was the ability to create automations with Zoom APIs to make thousands of changes without manual effort. They could remotely turn off phones on the old system, reboot them, and the phones would automatically connect to Zoom Phone. With those APIs, they were also able to consolidate over 60,000 rules in their dial plan into less than 200.

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:

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