Houston Texans
The Houston Texans use RingCentral contact center to make their customer experience even better
95%
reduction in desk phones, with staff now using the softphone and mobile app
1
unified environment for phone, text, digital fax, and contact center operations
< 1
hour to switch the entire organization over to the RingCentral platform
So much of our communications now happen on the RingCentral app or softphone. Our employees can text from anywhere using their business number, and we’ve even gotten rid of our old fax machines and a separate digital fax service we were paying for – because we can do all of that now through RingCentral.
Anthony Shade
Senior System Administrator
The NFL’s six-time AFC South Division Champions
Although it’s the newest team in the National Football League, the Houston Texans has already racked up several impressive feats in its short history.
The league’s 32nd franchise has won the AFC South Championship six times. A 2022 Forbes analysis found the Texans had built the 11th most valuable organization in the NFL. And according to a 2023 report by Sidelines, the Texans rank as a top-10 favorite team among football fans.
On their second phone system, but it felt like 4th and long
Jeff Schmitz, the Texans’ Vice President and Chief Information Officer, explains that the organization had switched from an on-prem phone system to a more modern cloud platform, but they found the newer system still couldn’t offer the capabilities the Texans staff needed.
“Everything was a challenge with that phone system – even simple adds, changes, and other basic administrative tasks” Jeff says. “That meant we had to bring in costly consultants to help us just about anytime we needed to make an adjustment to our phone environment.”
Bobby Rawlinson, Director of IT Service Delivery, adds that the system also created a significant challenge for the organization’s sales and customer service operations.
“Because the phone system didn’t integrate well with our CRM, we couldn’t centralize a record of all communications in each customer’s CRM profile. That meant an agent taking a call from a season-ticket holder who’d recently spoken with someone else on the team wouldn’t know about those previous conversations.”
RingCentral adds efficiencies and improves customer service
After a thorough vetting of cloud communication platforms, the Texans found RingCentral and RingCentral Contact Center standing alone in the end zone. Derek Beeman, Vice President of Ticket and Event Sales, explains the key reason.
“We have a complicated customer-facing telephony operation,” says Derek. “We’ve got teams of inside sales reps, reps focused on group sales, event sales specialists, and various service teams handling calls from season-ticket holders and other categories of customers. What we found so impressive with RingCentral Contact Center is how flexible the system is and how easy it is to create and update the IVRs so callers can easily direct themselves to the right people.”
In fact, as valuable as the Texans staff has found RingCentral for streamlining their internal operations, Jeff and his team agree that the most significant benefit has been how much RingCentral Contact Center is helping the customer-facing teams continuously improve their performance. Here’s how Senior System Administrator Anthony Shade describes it.
Our sales and support supervisors can log into the RingCentral Contact Center dashboard and see what’s happening with all of their agents. They can listen in on a call, whisper in an agent’s ear to help, even join the call if necessary. These things have been great for onboarding new agents, coaching our existing team, and just generally making the Texans customer experience continuously better.
Anthony Shade
Senior System Administrator
INDUSTRY
Professional sports
HQ
Houston, TX
YEAR FOUNDED
2002
EMPLOYEES
660
RingCentral and Microsoft Dynamics create an all-star team
And as Derek also points out, using the RingCentral for Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration has helped greatly improve his sales and service teams’ workflows and efficiencies.
The fact our agents can make and take calls through the RingCentral widget right in their Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment – and see screen pops of a customer’s history with us – is helping those reps work more efficiently, making their lives easier, and helping them have more personal and productive conversations with our customers.
Derek Beeman
Vice President of Ticket and Event Sales
Improving operations across the organization
As Anthony notes, RingCentral has also helped dramatically reduce the IT team’s need to maintain telephony hardware. “Even though our old phone system was technically a cloud solution, it was still designed to work primarily with physical phones. And we had 250 of them in the office. Since we switched to RingCentral, though, we’re now maintaining fewer than 10 desk phones – because pretty much everyone chose to take their communications mobile.”
In fact, Jeff adds, Texans employees who use Microsoft Teams for internal messaging are also using the RingCentral integration for Teams because it gives them full-featured cloud phone and text capability.
We’ve found the RingCentral phone system has a lot more functionality and flexibility than Microsoft Teams’ native phone service,” Jeff says. “So, the RingCentral integration with Teams has been a great way for us to give that convenient, anywhere phone capability to our employees who spend a lot of time in the Teams environment.
Jeff Schmitz
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
And Bobby explains that one of the most significant benefits of deploying RingCentral’s unified communications to all employees and RingCentral Contact Center for the Texans’ sales and support teams has been the organization’s ability to stay connected and productive from anywhere.
We rolled out RingCentral in 2021, during COVID, and we hadn’t fully come back to the office. But because now every employee could make and receive business calls from their PC or cell phone and our customer-facing teams would join call groups remotely, we were able to continue serving customers through the lockdown period.
Bobby Rawlinson
Director of IT Service Delivery