How Beacon Mobility unified 19,000
employees on one AI-powered platform

For a parent trying to find out where their child is, Ryan King knows that every second counts—even twenty seconds makes a huge difference. "That's a long time," he says. "That feels like a lifetime."
Ryan leads the Android division and AI solutions group at Beacon Mobility, one of the nation's largest providers of high-needs transportation. Across 25 states, the company operates 12,000 vehicles and employs 19,000 people. Beacon Mobility is a house of brands—a collection of regional transportation companies including Van Pool Transportation in New England, which has been serving families since 1980. 
Together, they're focused on what Ryan calls "the most precious cargo"—children with special needs, adults requiring paratransit services, and communities depending on safe, reliable transportation.
The company's mission is simple but profound: help people live, learn, and achieve. Their promise? "Every ride matters."
"One of the great things about what we do is that we make a difference every day," Ryan reflects. "I know when we get up in the morning that we're allowing students to get to school, and we know how important that is. It's so much more than just transporting a package from one place to another. We make a difference every day, and that's what makes it worth it."
But until recently, despite this deep commitment to the families they served, Beacon Mobility faced a troubling reality. With dozens of acquired companies each running different phone systems, they had virtually no visibility into their communications. 
When worried parents called about their children, when drivers needed support, when emergencies came up, the team had no data, no analytics, no way to know if they were delivering the support families desperately needed.

26 Systems, zero visibility

The problem started with growth. Beacon Mobility is a collection of 26 to 30 companies, each bringing their own phone system, vendor, and way of doing things. The goal was to create a solution that unified these chaotic, disjointed systems. 
"Before Dialpad, we had different technologies from a telephone solution standpoint," Gaurav explains. "You always used to hear anecdotes of 'Hey, the parents are calling in, but the calls are not getting picked up' or 'I waited in the call queue for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and the call dropped off.' It was nearly impossible to pull data to either validate the claim or learn from it to make improvements. It was very hard using data to pinpoint solutions and we were always shooting in the dark." 
The operational constraints went deeper. Desk phones—costing about $250 each—kept dispatchers and customer service teams tethered to their workstations. "A lot of our industry is about interacting with the drivers," Ryan notes. "You can't interact with the drivers if you're behind the desk." Yet that's exactly where the technology forced them to stay.
The systems had zero AI capabilities. New call center representatives took three to four months before they were fully ramped up, and they had to learn through trial and error rather than guided support. There was no language-based routing for Spanish-speaking families, no standardized playbooks for handling incidents, no way to track high-risk moments like "lost child" or "accident."
For Ryan, the stakes were clear: "If our people can't get hold of the people transporting children, if our customers can't get hold of the people transporting children, then we have a problem."

A platform built for Beacon Mobility’s needs

The moment Ryan and his team saw Dialpad's initial demo, something clicked. "The Van Pool team couldn't believe a platform like Dialpad existed," especially after dealing with their previous communications provider.
Dialpad’s AI-powered features were what sold Ryan on Dialpad. "The one thing that we wanted to make sure we did is find a solution that had AI native in its platform, not some kind of AI dropped on top of it," he explains. "That's really what sold me on Dialpad—it wasn't like, okay, go over here and use the AI solution. It's now just native and built into the platform."
For Gaurav, the priority was clear: analytics and reporting. After years of flying blind, the ability to see what was actually happening in their call centers was essential. But Dialpad offered something even more compelling for a company transporting vulnerable populations: the ability to capture high-risk moments. 
Custom alerts for phrases like "lost child" or "accident" automatically become internal notes, which was a "monumental selling point” for the Van Pool team.
Then there were the open APIs. Gaurav saw immediately how Dialpad could integrate with their systems, enriching their internal databases with communication data they'd never been able to capture before. 
The Van Pool team’s vision was ambitious: consolidate all 15-plus entities across Beacon Mobility onto a single, unified platform. And they believed Dialpad could make it possible.

Rolling out Dialpad to 27 offices in 2-3 months

Ryan decided to start with his Android division. The timeline? "We said, let's flip it out in six weeks. We just sort of picked a number out of the air and said, all right, let's do it." 
The transition was shockingly smooth. "People went home at night running on our old system. Then they came back in the morning running on the new system and it was fine.”
That success set the stage for something much bigger: rolling out Dialpad across Van Pool's entire New England operation—27 offices in 2-3 months, migrating two to three offices every single week.
"This has been one of our simplest rollouts of any technologies out there at scale," Gaurav reflects. "And it's saying something when we are rolling out technology in an industry which is not very forward in terms of technology."
What made the difference was partnership. "Oftentimes, with new technology implementation, there's a plan in place and it's rolled forward regardless of the needs of the organization," Ryan explains. 
"We never felt that way with Dialpad. They were always wondering what it is we needed and why." The team provided weekly updates, and after the first successful office transition, Gaurav felt like he didn’t need to stress about the other office transitions.
But perhaps the biggest change was physical. Teams moved from $250 desk phones to soft phones and Bluetooth headsets overnight. "That phone on the desk was kind of like a safety blanket," Ryan says. Yet after just a few days, "everybody was like, yeah, I'm good, I'm fine." 
The reason? Mobility. The soft phone app on mobile devices freed team members to interact with drivers in the field while staying connected to incoming calls. Gaurav captures the shift: "We want people to be spending less time behind the desk and more time in front of the desk—with their drivers, with the customers." 
Ryan sums it up: "We're replacing that telephone system with a communication system. Before it was about the telephone, now it's about the communication and the different ways that we can interact with the people that need that information." 

From shooting in the dark to clarity in 3 clicks

The impact of Van Pool’s transformation with Dialpad started with something simple: visibility.
"Before, we could still route calls where they needed to go, but I never knew what was happening in the organization," Ryan says. "Now it's 3 clicks and I know where we're at."
For Gaurav, this was everything. Before Dialpad, the team could never provide worried parents with an answer whenever they called about their calls getting dropped or ignored. "With Dialpad, it's very easy to say, 'This particular school district is saying that calls are not getting picked up.' Okay, let's go in. We can easily pull in the information to say: How many calls are coming in? What's getting picked up? What's not getting picked up? What are the wait times?"
But analytics did more than validate complaints—they changed how leadership thought about their role. "When I look at the analytics piece, it's about how do I support my team properly?" Ryan reflects. "If I'm seeing a lot of dropped calls, my question is, Hey, what is going on there? Do I have the right staffing in the right places?"
Heat maps became essential for staffing decisions. In the call centers, giant TV dashboards display real-time analytics so the entire team can see when available agents are running low and jump on queue. 
The result? Teams competing with themselves. "They get upset if the metrics end up going different from what they expected," Ryan says. "It's not about holding people accountable and telling them they're not doing a good job. It's about making sure you have the tools to support the people doing the tough job you've given them to do every day." 

AI that supports people, instead of replacing them

The AI features transformed how the team operates. Real-time transcriptions let them check conversations when there's a miscommunication and build libraries of real examples for training. Custom moments track safety-critical keywords—"late," "lost child," "accident"—allowing them to identify trends across locations. When they need to find a specific conversation but don't know the parent's name or phone number, they can search by student name or school district.
Perhaps most impactful were the AI Playbooks. "If you have a new call center rep and somebody calls in and they haven't dealt with that situation before, it's three, four months before they're really kind of firing on all cylinders," Ryan explains. 
"But now, they say the word 'late' and up pops, 'Hey, what are the four questions you need to ask?' Or God forbid there was an incident—make sure that they're in a safe location. Let's get those big things done so we can take care of the people and then we'll go through and get the other information that we need." Consistency replaced guesswork. AI Live Coach provides suggested responses agents can copy into internal chat, ensuring information flows uniformly.
When calls get heated—which happens when worried parents need answers—sentiment analysis automatically brings in additional support. "Nobody's on their own in a bubble," Ryan notes.

Operational wins beyond AI: Meeting customers where they are

The operational improvements extended beyond AI. Spanish-speaking families are now automatically routed to Spanish-speaking representatives, a feature Ryan calls "a big improvement over our old system" that makes it "a lot easier for our drivers, our parents to be able to get the answers they need as quickly as possible." 
The 15-person customer service team is distributed across the United States to handle different time zones rather than everyone working from Houston. For drivers, the team uses phone calls for urgent matters and SMS when they need information but shouldn't be disturbed during a ride.
Integration with HubSpot streamlined workflows even further. "What's been really nice is it reduces the amount of work for our people," Ryan says. "They don't have to go into Dialpad and then go into HubSpot."
The results speak through the voices of those leading the charge. "Positive reactions from the employees, from the customers where customer experiences getting uplifted," Gaurav reports. "A win across the board."
The entire New England region—27 offices—is now deployed. A sister company closed on Dialpad last quarter, and more affiliates are moving over as contracts expire. The team’s goal of unifying all 15-plus entities across Beacon Mobility onto a single platform is getting closer every day.
Most importantly, those agonizing seconds parents spend waiting for information about their children? They're getting shorter. And for Ryan, that's what it's all about: delivering answers when every second feels like a lifetime.

What's next: Beacon Connect and an expanding AI roadmap 

Three more regions are waiting to consolidate onto Dialpad, with all affiliated companies migrating as their contracts expire. Beacon Mobility gets closer to achieving its single-platform goal every day of unifying 15-plus entities ont.
But Gaurav's vision extends beyond consolidation. Beacon Mobility is building Beacon Connect, a custom platform that will integrate directly with Dialpad. "If I'm a dispatcher, I won't have to go into many different places to find answers," he explains. "It just becomes one place." The open APIs that initially attracted him are now making this possible.
The AI roadmap focuses on what matters most: speed and safety. Ryan envisions Dialpad pulling from Beacon's systems to deliver instant information to anxious parents—cutting those agonizing wait times. Voice-based routing could replace button-pressing for drivers who shouldn't be navigating phone menus while on the road.
Gaurav frames the bigger picture: "How do we eliminate the manual work and automate those mundane, repetitive tasks and give more time back to people? Because at the end of the day, we want people to be spending more time with people, and not with technology." 
For Ryan, the real opportunity goes beyond just using new technology. "Our biggest concern with implementing new technology is that we just do what we always did and expect a different result," he says. "By putting Dialpad in, it gives us an opportunity to have conversations about, 'Hey, what could we do that looks a little bit different?' And now we have a tool that allows us to do that." 
For 19,000 employees serving thousands of families every day, while delivering on tool is helping them live up to their promise their “every ride matters” promise.