Ray White Group

Ray White has adopted a RingCentral platform to remove core contact centre and telephony functionality from legacy infrastructure, as part of its cloud migration strategy. That has also opened a range of innovations, opportunities for future expansion and deployment of additional communications functionality across the national and international Ray White Group.
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Moving to RingCentral’s fully cloud-native Contact Centre solution has helped in de-risking the business and supported our ambitions of moving out of our data centre. Deploying RingCentral has put our telephony destiny in our own hands.

Ben Cowie

Head of IT Operations, Ray White

KEY STATS

De-risking the business by aligning with Ray White’s cloud migration strategy
Greater responsiveness and versatility in-house to action business requirements
Improved reporting across both telephony and contact centre environments
Increased contact centre efficiencies and outbound capabilities
Ray White is Australasia’s largest real estate group, with over 1,000 individual franchise offices across Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, the Middle East and Atlanta USA. In 2020, Ray White sold over $44billion worth of property. Established in 1902, Ray White continues to operate as a family-owned business spanning residential, commercial and rural property as well as hotels, marine, property management and property funds investment. The business runs primarily on a franchise model, with the Ray White Group providing overall management and support for the individual franchise owners, as well as other group services. Those services include Ray White Concierge, an 80-agent contact centre that can “take care of everything” for home buyers, renters, investors and sellers including discounts and finding services for home and contents insurance, removalists or tradespeople, homewares, artwork and more. Concierge helps more than 5,000 people a month in Australia and New Zealand move into their new home.
Ray White established a cloud-focused strategy in 2015, first rolling out a cloud-based technology platform to support its 1,000 franchise offices, including Google G Suite (now Google Workspace). With a goal to move all of its legacy infrastructure and applications into the cloud, Ray White began researching cloud-based alternatives for both its corporate on-premise PABX environment and its Ray White Concierge contact centre infrastructure. RingEX and RingCentral Contact Centre were selected in 2020 as the ideal replacement solutions.
INDUSTRY
Construction & Real Estate
HQ
Brisbane, Australia
YEAR FOUNDED
1902
EMPLOYEES
350 full-time staff, 15,000 franchisee staff

Moving to RingCentral Contact Centre

The relocation of Ray White’s Adelaide corporate office in mid-2020 gave the business its first opportunity to trial RingCentral as the replacement national telephony platform. However, it was RingCentral Contact Centre that had an immediate impact when it was implemented for Ray White’s Concierge operation. 
“Moving to RingCentral’s fully cloud-native Contact Centre solution has helped in de-risking the business and supported our ambitions of moving out of our data centre. Deploying RingCentral has put our telephony destiny in our own hands. Our incumbent solution was managed by a third party, while RingCentral meant we could bring the management back in-house. That gave us the ability to be nimble and more versatile, make changes and respond more rapidly to support both our own business initiatives and the services we provide to our franchisees and to their clients along the sales journey,” said Ben Cowie, Head of IT Operations, Ray White. 
Concierge makes over 50,000 calls per month and delivers almost 40,000 real estate opportunities to agents each year. As a volume-based business, the cost of the new solution was critical. RingCentral provided a price-comparable solution, with additional cost savings generated by moving platform support in-house. Consolidated billing has also simplified Ray White’s OPEX management processes.
However, the biggest benefit for Concierge is greater visibility - particularly in the areas of disposition and timecard reporting, call volume analytics, contact history reports and call recordings, explains Kelly Tatlow, CEO, Ray White Concierge:
“RingCentral allows us to better monitor our productivity, and work with our agents on their particular development areas, so that we can now focus our coaching and training for individual team members. Breaking down the volume of calls per hour into skills, teams and agents is very helpful to compare performance within our teams and to compare the volume of calls different teams can achieve.”
“Locating call recordings is so much easier and less time consuming with RingCentral Contact Centre compared with our prior system. When we click on the call link we can identify the skill, agent, disposition, date and time of the call, and immediately download the call recording,” said Tatlow.
Using RingCentral Contact Centre has improved both customer service and processes for supervisors, and enabled Concierge to deliver a number of innovations, which were invaluable during the 2021 lockdowns in Brisbane.
“The flexibility provided by RingCentral’s browser-based application has made it easy for team members to work from home. We have transitioned completely to softphones, which has given us more space on our desks, and a neater and cleaner environment and user experience for our agents,” said Tatlow.
RingCentral has also given Concierge greater flexibility and speed in moving agents between different teams and departments. From an outbound perspective, “the ability to change the caller ID via skills easily through the ACD function to switch between calling from mobiles, landlines, New Zealand and Australian numbers has been a big innovation for our business,” said Tatlow.
Tatlow also highlights enhanced real-time supervisor features and call back functions as significantly improving performance and customer experience in the contact centre. Compliance has also improved through RingCentral’s ‘Launch Call Recording’ and ‘Masking’ functions.
 “Prior to having RingCentral, our team members had to read advice or legislative scripting to customers on every call. Now we can pre-record that content and play it to a customer at the appropriate time, which means we are now confident with our compliance processes. It also makes the call a nicer experience to deliver for our staff and customers. We use RingCentral’s masking function to hide a client's credit card details in the recording when they pay for an insurance policy, which means we are compliant with privacy legislation,” said Tatlow.

Migrating to RingEX

The Adelaide migration to RingEX was “seamless”, said Cowie. 
Users were happy to adopt softphones rather than requiring handsets, which has enabled Ray White to accelerate the migration when its other corporate offices are cut over to RingCentral. “We can migrate our users to softphones first, then provide them with handsets if they need them in due course,” said Cowie.
Ray White successfully completed the migration of its Brisbane and Perth offices to RingEX in October and November 2021, using its own in-house team.
“With the knowledge gained during the previous migrations, our team is confident with the RingCentral system and we’ve been able to run with the implementation quite easily,” said Cowie.
Ray White’s own IT support team has been the first team to benefit from the upgrade: “it’s been a godsend for us in being able to have better metrics and reporting. We’ve been able to leverage RingCentral Live Reports, use call recording and barge-in on calls that require it – all great for a support team.”
The team has also been able to maintain a hybrid working model, which “enables our team members to work efficiently, regardless of their location, and have more work/life balance as well,” explained Cowie. 

Integrating with Google Workspace

RingCentral’s out-of-the-box integration with Google Workspace gives users single sign-on access to both sets of applications. The main feature in use is ‘click-to-call’ functionality in their Google Workspace and CRM applications. “Having these micro efficiencies provides a better user experience for our internal teams,” said Cowie.

National rollout and expansion to continue

Ray White is planning to implement RingEX in all corporate offices. The business also has confidence in the speed and ease with which it can deploy RingCentral to incorporate any future acquisitions, and is exploring how it can extend RingCentral’s benefits for its 1,000 franchisees – “there are some really good use cases for property management and administrative functions within these businesses where RingCentral would make an ideal solution,” said Cowie.
Ray White Concierge will be incorporating an email queue as part of the contact centre, where inboxes can be managed via skills as per inbound calls.
“We are also looking to use RingCentral Contact Centre’s capabilities to manage calls for other Ray White departments and interstate teams, with RingCentral’s flexibility allowing Concierge to easily set up agents in other corporate offices nationally,” said Tatlow.
Ultimately, moving core functionality like telephony out of the data centre and into the cloud has freed up Ray White to continue executing on its long-term cloud migration strategy.
“Moving to RingCentral has mitigated the risk associated with our contact centre relying on legacy data centre infrastructure and given us a better product, which has been great for our business,” Cowie concluded.