UCR streamlines call management and enhances hybrid teaching, learning, and working with Zoom

University of California, Riverside (UCR) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California. It serves 26,426 students, including 22,646 undergraduate and 3,780 graduate students.

In 2020, at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, UCR faculty quickly transitioned course materials and instruction online. UCR integrated its Zoom Meetings platform with Canvas LMS and productivity tools like Slack to support faculty hosting class meetings on Zoom. Later, when UCR faculty and students began meeting in person again, instructors needed to teach students in the classroom while accommodating students attending virtually. 

When Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer Matthew Gunkel joined UCR in March 2022, the most urgent priority for UCR Information Technology Solutions (ITS) was to rework UCR’s aging network infrastructure. The network included UCR’s landline telephone service infrastructure, which was implemented in the 1980s and housed in a building with a leaking roof.  

In addition to upgrading the telephone infrastructure, UCR organizations and departments required more robust contact center functionality for managing and routing calls and data capture.

In 2022, like UCR, several other University of California campuses needed to modernize their landline telephone service solutions. The University of California Office of The President considered the requirements across all UC campuses and selected Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center, which provided a VoIP phone solution and call management service that integrated well with UCR’s existing technology ecosystem and offered a familiar user interface. Another reason UCR selected Zoom was that the University of California system had a good working relationship with Zoom and saw that Zoom was updating its products to meet higher education requirements. 

UCR ITS grew interested in adding Zoom Rooms technology to enhance UCR’s classrooms and shared workspaces by providing a single login and consistent user interface for classroom and meeting room hardware, room scheduling tools, digital whiteboards, and other features.

Over the past 18 months, UCR has transitioned over 5,000 phone lines to Zoom Phone and has moved three of its ten campus contact centers , including the UCR Office of Financial Aid and UCR Health — the clinical enterprise of the UCR School of Medicine, over to Zoom Contact Center. They plan to migrate more of their contact centers to Zoom Contact Center in the next 12 to 18 months. 

The UCR Financial Aid office went live with Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center in April 2023. Assistant Director of Financial Aid Monica Martinez-Daniels says she noticed from the initial Zoom Contact Center demonstrations that Zoom Contact Center was easier to use and navigate than the Financial Aid team’s existing contact center solution. 

UCR Health went live with Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center in October 2023. Though UCR Health was exploring a different contact center solution in 2022, it discovered after adopting Zoom Contact Center for other departments that its functionality also met the health organization’s needs. 

Zoom was able to sign UCR Health’s Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to enable UCR Health to maintain protected health information (PHI) security and support their HIPAA compliance.  

UCR Health physicians and back-office staff use Zoom Phone lines and physical desk phones, while the call center and referral agents use Zoom Contact Center. 

UCR has deployed over 100 Zoom Rooms since Fall 2022. In 2023, the UCR ITS Multimedia and Classroom Technology team partnered with the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences on a pilot program focused on technology-assisted teaching methods. In the pilot, a cohort of graduate student instructors provided feedback, helping the team understand which Zoom Room features were most beneficial. UCR is currently piloting Zoom Rooms’ integrated reservation technology in select shared spaces, including the Student Success Center, and expects to roll it out more broadly throughout 2024.

Today, the UCR community leverages Zoom Meetings, Webinars, Phone, Contact Center, and Rooms. Gunkel says implementing multiple Zoom solutions for different university services has provided vertical integration advantages and simplified both the management and user experience for the services. For example, the Zoom Rooms functionality standardizes classrooms and shared spaces, creating a consistent interface for end users to leverage the technology in any room across campus. When class or meeting attendees get a Zoom Calendar invite to meet in a room with Zoom Rooms functionality, they can log in to use the microphones, speakers, video cameras, and displays with one touch from the calendar event. Students, faculty, and staff who have never used Zoom Rooms can usually accomplish their goals without requiring support because they are already familiar with the Zoom interface.

Further, Gunkel says transitioning to Zoom Phone has benefited UCR from a maintenance and overhead cost perspective. ITS is deploying and maintaining less physical infrastructure as they no longer need to physically run new phone lines to office spaces when faculty and staff move to new locations. The team has set up Zoom Phone to auto-provision phone numbers and features, and they can easily adjust each account’s configuration to meet user needs.

In the UCR Office of Financial Aid, Martinez-Daniels says Zoom Contact Center offers helpful functions that the team did not have in their previous contact center solution. For example, Zoom Contact Center provides a “Whisper” feature that allows supervisors to listen in while new staff members assist callers. Supervisors use the “Whisper” feature to guide new student workers answering calls, while the caller hears the student worker but not the supervisor. 

Martinez-Daniels says Zoom Contact Center also allows more customization in its configuration compared to their previous solution and lets the Office of Financial Aid align its phone tree menu to route calls to specialized financial aid units. For example, a caller seeking information about veterans’ benefits can route themself directly to the veterans’ benefits team rather than waiting in the general financial aid queue. Another helpful feature is that when students call in, they get information on how many callers are ahead of them in the queue and the average wait time to help temper their expectations. 

According to Martinez-Daniels, Zoom Contact Center captures more data than their previous solution, enabling more robust reporting. Now that the Office of Financial Aid has been using Zoom Contact Center for almost a year, the team is beginning to leverage its data to help them evaluate year-over-year trends and assess their staffing and communication strategies.

Linda Roney, UCR Health Director of Performance Excellence, says Zoom Contact Center allows the UCR Health team to provide patients with a more efficient call-in experience. When patients call the main UCR Health line, they can select from several phone tree options to reach the correct department. Meanwhile, the integration between Zoom Phone and Contact Center allows the agents answering Zoom Contact Center calls to see when physicians and back-office staff are busy with patients.

For example, in Zoom Contact Center, when an agent transfers a patient to another agent, the patient moves to the top instead of the end of the new agent’s queue. The UCR Health management team can also see when specific agent queues receive a high volume of calls, allowing management to shift callers from one queue to another. UCR Health administrators leverage the Zoom data for operations management forecasting so they can staff appropriately.  

Roney has noticed that Zoom has been receptive to her team’s feedback on functions they would like to see in Zoom Contact Center. Before transitioning to Zoom Phone and Contact Center, UCR Health asked for functionality to enable callers to listen to instructional recordings in Spanish. Based on UCR’s and other customers’ requests, Zoom rolled out the capability for callers to set their engagement language.

Gunkel says that UCR has not experienced significant Zoom service outages, and his team has only needed to contact Zoom for engineering support related to the institution’s specific configurations.

“Zoom has been a good partner in quickly understanding and resolving UCR’s issues. Zoom also provides robust administrative controls to facilitate UCR’s unique segmentation configurations and ensure the platform and services meet the University’s security requirements.”