RingCentral Assists Houston School District With Support Center For Distance Learning

The Houston County Board of Education is utilizing RingCentral’s (News - Alert) cloud services to support the district's growing dependence on remote services for distance learning. County officials are currently taking advantage of RingCentral’s communications solutions to manage technical difficulties experienced for over 30,000 K-12 students.

School districts across the country have been struggling to adapt to the remote conditions forced upon students due to pandemic restrictions. Though many districts are able to supply students with digital equipment needed to work from home, standard technical issues create new challenges for many users. Houston County has been dealing with large call volumes for technical support, which led officials to create a solution that addresses the common issues that many callers are collectively experiencing. Because Houston county already uses RingCentral's cloud services, the technical support line for callers was able to be deployed in less than one hour.

“During the pandemic, when the county went into lockdown and we were all working remotely, it was tremendously beneficial to be able to quickly create call groups to manage common issues and get them fixed,” said Brian Trent, director of Technology for the Houston County Board of Education. “The benefits of having RingCentral went beyond our makeshift support center. The SMS text feature using the school’s numbers, meant a teacher or administrator who couldn’t take a parent’s call could still respond via SMS text.”

Students can now use the technical support line to help with common issues for remote learners, such as login/account problems, laptop malfunctions, or general questions about the online learning platform.

“We all know that 2020 was a tough year for teachers, students and parents transitioning to remote learning,” said Nat Natarajan, executive vice president of Products and Engineering at RingCentral. “It’s great to see a customer use RingCentral in an innovative way like Houston County Board has to help ease through a difficult transition.”