Iowa 80 Group
The leading truck-service company uses RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center to improve operations, save money, and hire the best employees no matter where they are.
0
phone downtime issues in the five years since implementing RingCentral
28
desk phone models and dozens of carrier contracts … all consolidated to one
Thousands
of dollars saved monthly unifying communication services with RingCentral
As the head of technology for an international company, I naturally worry about all the things that could go wrong and negatively affect our operations. That’s part of the job. But one thing I never worry about anymore is our telephony — not since we switched to RingCentral.
Rob Henry
CIO & CTO
The world’s largest truckstop and truck scale network
Whether they need their trucks fueled, washed, weighed, or outfitted with new accessories — or if they’re just looking for a friendly place to stop and enjoy a nice meal — truckers across North America visit an Iowa 80 Group property millions of times every year.
Serving professional drivers and the motoring industry for more than half a century, Iowa 80 Group runs the world’s largest network of truck weighing facilities (CAT Scale), the world’s biggest truckstops (Iowa 80 Truckstops), and one of the industry’s most popular e-commerce stores (Iowa80.com).
The company’s commitment to the trucking industry is so strong, in fact, that they built a museum to honor it. And in 2021, TripAdvisor named the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum a Traveler’s Choice Award Winner for Worldwide Attractions.
INDUSTRY
Hospitality
HQ
Walcott, IA
YEAR FOUNDED
1964
EMPLOYEES
1,100+
A phone system requiring costly maintenance and offering no redundancy
Rob Henry, Iowa 80 Group’s CIO & CTO, explains that although the company’s previous phone system was generally sufficient, it had a few important shortcomings — some of which could have seriously threatened the company’s operations during the pandemic if they hadn’t already migrated to RingCentral by that time. (Fortunately, they had.)
“One of the biggest challenges was that we had no disaster recovery for our phones,” Rob says. “If our servers or network went down here at the Iowa headquarters, it could take down phone service completely. That posed an ongoing threat to our call center agents, many of whom we need to be accessible to customers literally 24/7.”
The other challenge, Rob explains, was that the complexity and fragility of the old system meant the company needed to pay consultants to administer it.
“We had a third-party company managing the system and another consultant just to help us make adjustments to things like our IVRs or call queues. It was that complicated.”
RingCentral brings cost savings, improved operations, and peace of mind
One of the main reasons Rob and his team chose RingCentral was the platform’s disaster recovery capabilities. The additional functionality and cost savings that RingCentral offered were important factors as well, Rob explains, but he knew his first responsibility was to ensure the company’s phone service was no longer vulnerable to a single point of failure.
“I read up on RingCentral and found that the company serves as its own carrier and has multiple data centers that are geographically distributed — all of which means that if there’s ever a problem, we can resume normal operations very quickly.”
But as Rob adds, the other benefits that drew his team to RingCentral have proven invaluable to Iowa 80 Group as well — particularly the Contact Center solution.
RingCentral Contact Center makes it easy for our customer service teams to manage their own IVRs and call queues. And because it works on any device, it lets us expand our pool of agent candidates to basically everywhere. These are things we couldn’t do with the old system, and they’ve definitely improved our customer experience.
Rob Henry
CIO & CTO
Unified communications adds efficiencies and lowers costs
Rob also notes that departments across Iowa 80 Group are finding ways to improve their workflows and become more accessible using RingCentral’s unified communications platform.
For example, Rob explains that RingCentral gives Iowa 80 Group employees added mobility and flexibility. “I was on a call with someone on my team who works in a different state, and in the middle of our conversation I flipped the call to my RingCentral mobile app, left my office, and started driving home. My coworker had no idea until I told him I was pulling into my driveway.”
But even with all of the new capabilities the company is enjoying, Rob points out that migrating to RingCentral has resulted in an overall savings on IT communications costs.
“We were paying about $2,000 a month for a digital faxing vendor, but we’ve eliminated that expense because it’s included with RingCentral,” he says, adding that this is just one of several cost-saving examples.
“We’re also no longer paying for in-house phone servers, or to have consultants manage our system, or even for the ridiculous costs to maintain our old analog lines. And of course, if we didn’t have RingCentral when the pandemic started, we would’ve had to pay yet another vendor for video conferencing licenses.”
We’re using pretty much everything on the RingCentral app: voice, video conferencing, SMS texting, voicemail, even electronic faxing. And to give you one example of the benefits of this, our in-house recruiters are having huge success with texting. It’s a great way to keep employee candidates up-to-date during the process, and our recruiters can now easily exchange those text messages from their business numbers no matter where they are.
Rob Henry
CIO & CTO