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See how Azusa Pacific University keeps enrollment high while transitioning 1,500 employees and 7 campuses to remote work
Azusa Pacific University, or APU as many folks call it, is a university that offers more than 150 degree options and a wide variety of programsâboth online and on campus at, count âem, seven regional locations across Southern California.Â
Not only that, APU continues to be recognized annually as one of Americaâs best colleges.
So, how do they keep things running smoothly across seven campuses... and with over 1,500 employees?
Rob Davis, Director of Personal Technology, can tell you a bit about that. He runs APUâs IT Department, and their focus is on helping everyone in the university, from employees to students, be more productive using technology.Â
That includes everything from helping the Advising department sign students up for the right courses, to working with the Admissions department on how to communicate better with prospective students.Â
And when youâre running IT at a school this big, doing all this while making the transition to being a distributed workforce can beâwell, letâs say, a fun challenge.
From a phone on every desk, to⊠well, the cloud
APU used to have an on-prem cloud system, with nothing in the cloud at all. Every employee had a phone on their desk. (Which, as you might imagine, didnât last too longâtheyâre a Google campus, after all.)
Not to mention the fact that theyâre also using other software like Salesforce for their Admissions team and Zendesk for their call centers.Â
âOut of all the different vendors in the cloud phone system space we looked at, there were a few reasons why we chose Dialpad,â Rob explained. âOne was the call transcription, which really set it apart in the beginning.âÂ

(Did you know? Dialpadâs real-time transcription is even more accurate than Google.)Â
âWe couldnât live without it.â
For a university, your Admissions team is pretty much your sales team. They need to do a ton of outreach and essentially sell students on coming to your schoolâand it can be every bit as intense and high-pressure as your average sales job.
So, Rob equipped APUâs Admissions groups across all seven campuses with Dialpad Sell to communicate better with both students and prospective students.
The nice thing was Dialpad integrates with Salesforce, which the Admissions team was already using. This integration gave the team an embedded dialer in Salesforce, and also automatically logs all their calls, activities, and objects:Â

And of course, he didnât forget about the IT Help Center team, which also works remotely. âWe gave them Dialpad Talk and said, âWeâll set up a department for you and a phone number for you to answer calls remotely,â Rob recounts. âWithin a week, we moved our whole Help Center team over. We couldnât live without Dialpad.â
If he ever needs to add more users or set up phone numbers for them on Dialpad? An admin can do that in the backend in literally a few clicks:

Dropping voicemails, saving time
One thing APUâs Admissions team especially liked was Dialpadâs voicemail drop feature. It basically allows a rep to play a pre-recorded message when they hit a prospectâs voicemail instead of having to recite a voicemail message every single time:Â

âThey call students every day,â said Rob, âAnd instead of spending precious minutes on every call saying the same thing over and over again, they can save that time and still deliver the same friendly message."
Fun fact: APU was a bit hesitant to use the voicemail drop feature initially. Why? Because people thought that a recorded message wasnât going to sound friendly enough.Â
âItâs funny because eventually they realized, âNo, we can make that voicemail drop as friendly as you want it to be. You can add your own personality into the message!â said Rob.Â
âOnce they started to try it and saw how much time it was saving them, that was the game changer.â
Thanks for sharing your story with us, Rob! Education is probably one of the toughest industries to be in when you work in technology, especially when youâre faced with the task of updating all that technology in a short period of time. We loved hearing about APUâs story, and are excited to help other educational institutions and schools make a smooth transition from in-person to hybrid and remote work.Â