Case Studies

Seafood company catches more calls

Wild Ocean Seafoods sees a 60% improvement in call connect rate with RingCentral.

William McCabe didn’t want to work for his family business, Wild Ocean Seafoods, LLC, a seafood company located in Ferndale WA and Honolulu HI, privately owned by members of two intertwined families for 112 years.  William had worked in computers and telecommunications and had started successful ebusinesses.  It was his technology experience that brought him back. 

“We have old timers, my uncles, and others, not technically savvy.  They think a fax machine is high tech,” William laughs.

When William returned, he updated www.WildOceanSeafoods.com with an online sales channel and got an 800 number to take the calls.

“We really needed a Virtual 800 number that would ring where we were as opposed to just in the office. We tried Toll Free Live,” says William, “We had several problems with that service.  There was a significant call delay, up to 45 seconds, before it would even ring; and there was no caller ID.  The call delay was causing dropped calls because they heard no ring tone, the wait message was confusing and no one was leaving a message. The lack of caller ID meant there was no way to call them back.”

William saw a note on the ProStores discussion board that said try RingCentral, so he did.  “And we’ve been very, very happy with it.  Not only does it cost less, but the efficacy of how it works is far superior. The customer calls and the phone rings immediately.”

“Fifty percent of our business comes in through the 800 number, for a lot of reasons,” he says.  “There are customers like my mom who don’t want to put their credit card on the internet and want to call.  Other customers call because they want more information or because they had questions on shipping.  Virtually all of our wholesale customers call. Unlike many Web based businesses, we encourage our customers to call.”

“All of our calls now go through immediately,” William says. “And because it rings right away, we have a 60-100% improvement in the call connect rate, where the customer talks to someone rather than hanging up.  So we don’t get a lot of hang ups.”

Everybody at Wild Ocean Seafoods has a production job and is in the office only when they’re not doing that job.  So each day, someone wears the Wild Ocean Seafoods dedicated 800 number cell phone on a lanyard around his neck.  When the phone rings, they know it is an order.

“And if we miss a call,” he continues, “if someone put it down or didn’t hear it, then we have their caller ID and we can call back and say, ‘Hey, sorry we missed your call.’  You can get right back to the customer and they are happy. The number of times the customer will call you again if they don’t get through is quite low.”