Chartered Accountants ANZ (CA ANZ) recently implemented a permanent hybrid ‘1-2-3’ working policy – three days working from home, two days in the office, with one of those days, the entire team in the office. The policy is something that would not have been considered before the deployment of RingCentral Office, RingCentral Contact Centre and Microsoft Teams, explains Richard Wiltshire, General Manager Technology at CA ANZ.
“Now it’s literally a case of picking up a laptop, plugging in a set of earphones and you’ve got all the resources that you need anywhere in the world to be able to service our members, no matter your role,” says Wiltshire.
CA ANZ is recognised among leading professional accounting bodies in the world, representing more than 128,000 financial professionals, supporting them to make a difference to the businesses, organisations and communities in which Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand work and live. Formed as a result of a merger of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia and the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants, CA ANZ has undergone considerable international expansion with offices now also in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the UK. This is providing CA ANZ’s members with international support, connecting with key business communities, like-minded professional associations and investment bodies globally.
As part of a drive to consolidate and optimise its disparate networking and communications environment globally, CA ANZ implemented a single unified communications platform for all its operating countries and staff, comprising RingCentral Office and RingCentral Contact Centre, natively integrating video and phone, and upgrading its contact centre capability all within the same platform. The solution is providing fully featured video and audio conferencing, contact centre, analytics and reporting, together with application integration with CA ANZ’s Microsoft Teams and Salesforce platforms.
This aligned with the organisation’s ‘as-a-service’ technology transformation vision to reduce the organisation’s reliance on operating on-premise infrastructure and to reposition the office networks as essentially ‘internet cafés’, says Wiltshire.
“For our staff and our members coming into our offices, they’ll jump on a network and consume all of their resources and services out in the cloud. We wanted to move away from on-premise technology because we don’t see the value in running our own infrastructure anymore. This also frees up our team from the time-consuming process of patching servers or performing updates, allowing them to focus on more valuable work.”
Functionality was the key driver for change for CA ANZ’s communications and contact centre technology.
“One of the most immediate benefits for us has been the ability to change our IVR workflows at short notice and quite simply without any coding,” said Wiltshire.
The RingCentral platform has also been effective in helping CA ANZ manage its annual subscription renewal period at the end of each financial year.
“These periods are an incredibly busy time for us and our members. Working with the RingCentral team and the technology, we’ve been able to ramp up that contact centre capability in rapid fashion for renewals.”
However, it was the deployment of RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams that has been “an absolute game changer” for CA ANZ. Staff can effectively service members from anywhere, says Wiltshire.
“It just provides a seamless experience between RingCentral and Team’s collaboration, which we otherwise could not get in an organisation structured like ours. Now that RingCentral is integrated into Teams, our users don’t have to use a separate app to make a call, and it’s a really strong, reliable contact form for voice.”
Overall, CA ANZ has experienced significant improvements in efficiency with RingCentral, particularly the savings made on both the organisation’s annual telco and maintenance spend, and in being able to redeploy internal resources to more strategic projects. Ultimately, rather than just supporting technology, this has resulted in membership fees contributing directly to creating value for CA ANZ’s 120,000 members.
“We’ve increased our engagement across our members using RingCentral’s collaboration platform and made a real difference to the membership community as a result,” said Wiltshire.
Originally published 16 Jul, 2021, updated 20 Jul, 2021
