Achieving enhanced communication capabilities and greater visibility on calls through the implementation of RingCentral has had a radical and positive impact on Accredited Power’s direct marketing effectiveness, overall productivity and its employee satisfaction and customer experience.
National energy efficiency installer Accredited Power Saver Co (‘Accredited Power’) is Australia’s largest residential LED installer with its head office and call centre in South Australia, and operations in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. A significant proportion of Accredited Power’s business is represented by LED replacement projects, particularly where State government energy saving schemes have made it either free (in Victoria) or just $33 for householders (in NSW) to replace their inefficient and outdated halogen, incandescent and compact fluorescent lights.
Its most effective LED replacement marketing campaigns have been printed letterbox mail drops, which Accredited Power has always advertised with national 1300 phone numbers, so that inbound calls could be managed centrally through its Adelaide call centre. With Accredited Power receiving between 400-500 calls a day and charged for the time of each call received, these 1300 numbers used to cost the business up to $6000 a month to operate.
Reliant on a traditional NEC PSTN phone system, Accredited Power had no visibility on call volumes and queuing status, and required frequent and expensive on-site visits from technicians to fix problems or implement changes.
In early 2020, Accredited Power realised that a radical change was needed, and worked with telecommunications and cloud unified communications consultancy TelcoDataCloud to advise on upgrading and transitioning to a new communications platform.
“When COVID first hit, we had to come to a position where we could still have inbound calls, but people had to work from home. And, of course, all of our NEC infrastructure was locked into the office. Talking to TelcoDataCloud opened our eyes to the concept of unified communications and a whole set of features that we didn’t know were possible,” said Damian Broadbent, Finance Director & Company Secretary, Accredited Power.
As a result, Accredited Power decided to upgrade to a RingCentral MVP platform and the RingCentral Live Reports add-on feature for a dashboard of real-time performance data and call queues. These applications were made available for all users.
The implementation started in January 2020, with TelcoDataCloud supporting the process in transitioning users from the old system to RingCentral, and training Accredited Power’s internal team so that they could be self-sufficient in managing the platform.
Accredited Power also equipped all staff with laptops, which meant that when everyone had to work from home during lockdown, it was a quick and seamless transition.
“It was fantastic. The business continued on without missing a beat! Essentially the call centre was all together in the office one day, and the next day we all moved to our different homes – and from a customer perspective, it made no difference,” said Broadbent.
Ironically, when lockdowns ended in Adelaide, and its call centre agents were able to move back into the office, Accredited Power faced another major challenge. The company had moved into new premises but had a long wait for its NBN connection activation. Using RingCentral, the call centre was fully operational in the new office for ten weeks running just on a 4G access point.
National coverage, local connections
The new RingCentral solution has given Accredited Power the opportunity to try something new with its direct marketing. Whereas it had previously advertised national 1300 phone numbers in its pamphlets, they could now use local numbers, which meant the business was immediately saving up to $6000 on its monthly phone bills. It also had a positive impact on the customer experience.
“With RingCentral we are able to easily set up our own call queues. We have different marketing programs going on, so we can use different numbers and pipe those calls through to different call queues and the right internal skill sets. By using an 02 number in NSW or an 07 number in Queensland, customers in that State felt like they weren’t ringing a national call centre; they were ringing someone local,” said Broadbent.
Accredited Power is now able to do live call transfers of inbound calls to its scheduling team in Melbourne to book in installations, with full visibility on the availability of staff ready to take the calls. That’s improved the conversion rate on opportunities, reducing the time it used to take to ring back customers and dramatically improved the customer experience when they first call Accredited Power. Broadbent calculates that the RingCentral platform has resulted in a productivity improvement of 30-40%.
The RingCentral platform has been extended to include Accredited Power’s operations and users in California and upstate New York in the US, with extensive use made of instant messaging and video for one-on-one sessions and team meetings. A third-party company in Malaysia that audits all its LED installations under the State government schemes has also been set up on the RingCentral platform – so that the two teams can communicate easily and in real-time using video, voice, file sharing and team messaging. This allows any photos from installations, call recordings and other documentation to be shared in real-time between the businesses to quickly resolve any issues or questions that emerge through the audit process.
Now, Accredited Power is investigating integration opportunities with its CRM platform, looking forward to ongoing feature releases in RingCentral apps, and developing further insights into customer experience, sales opportunities and productivity improvements through the analytics and reporting capabilities of the solution.
For more information about Accredited Power and the energy efficiency services it provides go to https://accreditedpower.com.au. More details on the services provided by TelcoDataCloud can be found at https://www.telcodatacloud.com.
Originally published 21 Oct, 2021, updated 22 Oct, 2021
