How a Multi-Campus University Cut Incident Notification Time by 78%
78% faster campus-wide incident notification
About this case study: results are from a real Salamtalk deployment. The customer’s name is a pseudonym and their logo is withheld under a confidentiality agreement. The metrics below are reported as measured.
The situation
Brightfield University operates across multiple campuses, each historically running its own phone system with its own extension numbering and its own department directories. Academic terms and vacation periods created a recurring operational problem: staffing and call routing needs changed substantially between term time and breaks, but the phone systems did not adjust.
- Departmental extensions were inconsistent across campuses. The same department on two campuses might have entirely different numbering conventions, confusing students and staff who moved between sites.
- Term-time and vacation routing had to be changed manually. Facilities, admissions, and student services staffed differently depending on the calendar, but call routing didn’t follow automatically.
- Campus-wide notifications were slow to assemble. Reaching relevant staff and departments quickly when something needed broad, fast communication relied on phone trees and manual call lists.
What they needed
Brightfield wanted a consistent departmental extension scheme across all campuses, call groups that matched how departments actually staffed during term time versus vacation periods, and a faster way to notify relevant staff across campuses when something required urgent, wide communication.
It was important to the university, and to Salamtalk, that this be scoped accurately from the start: the notification capability complements the university’s official emergency and life-safety systems and procedures. It is not a replacement for them, and it was never positioned or deployed as a life-safety system in its own right.
What we deployed
| Requirement | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Departmental extensions | Unified extension scheme applied consistently across all campuses |
| Call groups | Department-level groups reflecting actual staffing, not just org chart |
| Term/vacation routing | Separate routing profiles for term time and vacation, switched on a calendar |
| Campus notification | Fast multi-department notification calling and messaging for operational and administrative alerts |
| Directory | Single cross-campus directory, searchable by department and campus |
The term-time and vacation routing profiles were built from how departments actually staffed each period, rather than from a generic academic calendar, since some departments — admissions during application season, for instance — ran different schedules from the rest of the university.
How the rollout ran
- Mapped every department’s extension, call group membership, and staffing pattern across all campuses, department by department.
- Designed a single extension numbering scheme to replace the inconsistent per-campus conventions.
- Built term-time and vacation routing profiles for each department, validated against the prior year’s actual staffing calendar.
- Piloted campus notification calling with the facilities and student services departments on one campus.
- Extended the extension scheme, routing profiles, and notification setup to the remaining campuses in stages across a term.
The pilot on notification calling specifically tested how quickly relevant department heads across campuses could be reached for an operational matter — not an emergency — to establish a baseline before wider rollout.
The results
- 78% faster campus-wide incident notification, measured as time from initiating an alert to confirmed contact with relevant department heads
- Consistent departmental extensions now used across all campuses, replacing per-campus numbering
- Term-time and vacation routing now switches automatically rather than requiring manual reconfiguration each period
- Single cross-campus directory replacing separate per-campus listings
The notification time improvement reflects faster reach to operational and administrative contacts for matters requiring prompt, broad communication. It measures the university’s internal notification process on Salamtalk, not performance of, or any substitute for, Brightfield’s official emergency response systems, which remained unchanged and are not part of this deployment.
What was harder than expected
Reconciling staffing calendars across departments took longer than the technical build. Several departments’ actual term-time and vacation staffing did not match the university’s published academic calendar, and getting accurate, current staffing patterns from every department head across multiple campuses required more coordination than expected before routing profiles could be finalised.
Some long-standing campus-specific extension numbers were hard to let go of. A few departments had used certain extension numbers for decades and were published in printed materials still in circulation. Brightfield chose to keep a small number of legacy extensions as aliases alongside the new unified scheme rather than force an immediate full switch, which added some ongoing complexity to the dial plan in exchange for a smoother transition for students and staff.
Next steps: see business VoIP for departmental calling, enterprise communications for multi-site deployments, or talk to our team about a campus rollout.