Westerville City Schools

Westerville City Schools, a renowned school system serving the community of Westerville, Ohio and the surrounding areas, embarked on a transformative journey to overhaul their communication services and infrastructure. The goal was to achieve a more efficient, reliable, and future proof total solution while partnering with a customer service driven service provider.

Located just outside Columbus, OH and serving a diverse community of students and staff, Westerville City Schools required a scalable and robust communication solution to ensure seamless interaction within the schools and with external stakeholders. Their legacy phone system and phone services were outdated, costly, and unable to meet the growing demands of modern education communication needs.

Westerville City Schools recognized the need to update their communication services infrastructure to better serve their diverse community of students, educators, and staff. The existing Mitel phone system and AT&T phone services were proving to be increasingly inadequate, costly, and inefficient for the school’s growing needs. Furthermore, the continuing struggles with customer service and support, specifically from AT&T, were becoming a recurring point of frustration with the School’s staff.

Thus, Westerville Schools began the search for a complete replacement of both the Mitel system and AT&T services which would help the District meet its communication and technology needs for the decades to come.

Faced with an outdated Mitel system, escalating costs and poor customer service from AT&T, the challenges were clear. Westerville City Schools put forth its primary goals for the new solution included:

Adding to the project’s unique challenges was the timeline for implementation.  Both the phone system and phone services would need to be replaced over the School’s summer break.  This provided a narrow window of just 12 weeks to implement a system of over 1,000 phones and port all of the District’s phone numbers.

Accent and its exclusive combination of a unique SaaS-based telephony system, flexible financial model, and commitment to customer success proved to be the winning formula for Westerville Schools. “Accent has done a wonderful job for us,” says Tim Stiffler Director, Information Technology for Westerville Schools.  “They are responsive when we have issues and work to provide solutions.”

Along with Accent’s SaaS-based phone system, Westerville Schools chose Accent to provide SIP-based phone service for the District as well.  This decision marked a significant migration away form the District’s previous long-term provider, AT&T.

By deploying Accent’s software-based phone system and SIP-based phone service, Westerville Schools hit the mark and achieved their project goals.

Accent SaaS Phone System (replacing the Mitel phone system)

• Provides a modern software-based and scalable phone system deployed onsite via Westerville Schools’ virtual infrastructure. The software-based nature of the system allows for a redundant architecture with full failover capabilities via the virtual infrastructure.
• Accent’s unique software subscription model includes full software support, maintenance, software upgrades, and technical support from Accent’s staff. Making annual software and maintenance charges reliable and predictable for the District.

Accent CloudSIP VoIP Phone Service (replacing AT&T phone service)

• Provides cost savings and scalability over the previous legacy AT&T PRI’s. Deployed in a redundant architecture, the service provides high availability SIP trunking to the District and its users.
• Changes and updates to Accent VoIP services can now be made in minutes instead of weeks with the previous AT&T services.