Queen Mary University of London

The situation

Universities operate on academic calendars, not business calendars. Most of the year, communication demands are relatively steady. Then Confirmation and Clearing arrive. These are intense periods when school leavers accept or change their university offers, and institutions scramble to fill final places. Phone lines ring constantly. Queries pour in, questions about accommodation, about student loans, about course specifics. For a university’s communications infrastructure, Clearing is a stress test that happens every August like clockwork.

Queen Mary University of London faced an additional pressure: their existing PBX telephone system was ageing. It was doing its job, but it couldn’t evolve to meet the university’s aspirations. The institution wanted a cloud-first approach. They wanted to integrate voice communications with collaboration tools like video and messaging. They wanted to give students and staff better ways to connect. But their legacy PBX couldn’t deliver any of that.

The starting point for renewal was clear: whatever system replaced the old PBX had to handle Clearing without breaking. There was no room for system instability during peak demand. The university needed to be confident that a new system could process call volumes that were several times higher than normal operation.

What SCC did

SCC partnered with RingCentral to replace the ageing PBX with an integrated unified communications and contact centre platform. The decision to go cloud-based rather than on-premises reflected the university’s direction of travel. A cloud platform scales more easily than on-premises infrastructure. It integrates more naturally with modern collaboration tools. It doesn’t require the university to manage physical telephone switches.

The implementation required careful sequencing. SCC and RingCentral didn’t attempt to move the entire university at once. Instead, they piloted the system with specific departments and faculties. This allowed the university to validate that RingCentral’s platform could handle their workflows, both routine operations and peak periods, before committing all communication to the new system.

The Clearing period became the validation test. Rachel Bence, involved in the implementation, confirmed that the system performed well during peak demand. RingCentral telephony and call centre services powered by SCC handled the enormous call volumes that Clearing generated. Every student phoning in found lines available. Staff had the tools they needed to respond to queries. The system didn’t just work, it enabled the university to serve students better because staff weren’t constrained by the limitations of the old system.

What changed

Queen Mary gained flexibility in how communication happened. Staff could use their preferred devices. Calls could be routed intelligently. The contact centre could see queue depths and route incoming calls to available staff rather than leaving callers listening to hold music. The university also gained a foundation for future integration. With a cloud-based, API-first platform, the university could add new communication channels, text messaging, video chat, chat, without replacing infrastructure again.

What the client learned

The university learned that system replacement is most successful when you have a clear, high-stakes test case built into your timeline. Clearing wasn’t an additional challenge to the implementation. It was the validation. Queen Mary knew that if the new system handled Clearing, it could handle anything else the year threw at them. The learning extended to partnership: by choosing a partner who understood both the technology and the university context, Queen Mary could move faster. SCC and RingCentral didn’t need to learn how universities operate. They brought that knowledge to the project.