Getting all the bells and whistles without the investment

Ed Brill got the phone and fax service he needed and found it delivered more than he expected.

ITS Magellan Services provides reservation and sales services to over 700 independent hotels in about 30 countries.  It has five employees in the USA, one in Italy and three in South America.

They receive calls from hotels with software questions or consumers about booking questions.  “We needed a way to separate the calls and get it to the right person,” says Ed Brill, ITS Magellan’s president.  “Our phone line provider could not give us the services that we wanted—caller attendant, voicemail, email to fax and fax to email—without buying an enormously expensive phone system for twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars and we just didn’t want to do that.  So I did some research, found RingCentral and we tried it.”

Ed set up separate extensions for each function: 1 for new reservations, 2 for hotel support, 3 for sales and so on.  The calls go to whoever handles those tasks.  New reservations go to Ft. Lauderdale; accounting, sales and business development go to New York.  Ed found the set up and ongoing management of the system to be extremely easy.  “For example,” Ed says, “if one of the staff in Florida is ill, on vacation or on a business trip, we can quickly direct all his calls and all his work over to somebody else during that time period.”

RingCentral’s internet faxing proved immediately helpful in addressing their high volume of faxes.  “Before, we had paper city,” he says.  “You hoped nobody would light a cigarette for fear of fire, but the faxes now come as emails.  We can receive faxes and forward them immediately to the local office that is responsible for that function.  It has dramatically decreased the need to print everything and it has easily kept up with all the correspondence in a timely way and it’s done it in a way that’s easy to manage.”

RingCentral also proved to be a management tool.  “RingCentral has given me management information that I never had before,” he says.  “Being in New York with the operations center in Ft. Lauderdale, RingCentral helps me monitor the voicemails and faxes and communication that goes to a particular department  and whether the messages are being handled.”