RingCentral made our call flows a lot easier and they were condensed down while achieving the same result and saving time if changes need to be made. We have saved hundreds of dollars per month moving to RingCentral.
Pierre Delpech
System Administrator Altronics
KEY STATS
Reduced costs and rapid deployment with minimal user impact in migration to RingCentral
Simplified call handling and call flows across the organisation
Mobile app enhanced connectivity of travelling staff and improved business continuity
Staff able to connect easily travelling internationally without new data plans or global roaming
For over 40 years, Altronics Distributors Pty Ltd (‘Altronics’) has been a valued supplier of quality electronic components and public address equipment. Altronics operates from five major warehouses and 11 retail outlets around Australia with over 10,000 products available in-store and online for customers in Australia and world-wide. A fully Australian owned and operated company, Altronics is committed to ensuring a high level of product quality, service and support.
“We are a very customer-focussed business. We prefer to deal directly with our customers mainly by phone and email, and our travelling sales reps regularly stay in touch with customers in-person,” said Pierre Delpech, System Administrator, Altronics.
Altronics had already migrated from on-premise PABX equipment to Mitel’s MiCloud Connect cloud business communications service, but experienced reliability issues with outages under Mitel’s ‘four 9s’ service level agreement (99.99% SLA). Travelling staff were also not able to effectively use the mobile app for softphone functionality when on the road.
Due to limitations with the telephony platform and the complexity of Altronics’ operations (particularly due to dual headquarters in Perth and Sydney and time zone differences across the country) Altronics was managing more than 40 hunt groups in the system.
Reduced cost and increased speed of migration
RingCentral’s unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solution was recommended as Altronics’ ideal replacement for MiCloud Connect.
In deciding to migrate to RingCentral, one of the key benefits for Altronics was the ability to keep its existing Mitel handsets. RingCentral is Mitel’s exclusive UCaaS partner globally and most of the current Mitel phones have been certified to work with RingCentral’s Message Video Phone (RingEX) platform.
In retaining its existing phones, Altronics reduced the overall cost of migration and no additional user training was required for new handsets. The hardware compatibility also assisted the speed of deployment. Altronics’ 88 handsets nationally were provisioned on the new RingCentral platform in under four hours.
Powerful mobile app
The RingCentral softphone app was deployed to users’ smartphones, which has given Altronics greater business continuity in case of any internet or network connectivity issues on site. Staff are still able to make and receive calls over their 4G or 5G connection.
However, the softphone app has had the biggest impact on travelling staff, explained Delpech.
“Our sales reps mainly use the softphone to stay connected to the business easily while on the road. The RingCentral app makes it very easy to find and call a colleague internally without having to dial any main lines and then be patched through to a staff member. The RingCentral app is also deployed to staff travelling overseas without the need for extra data plans or international roaming to make calls.”
Ease of management and operational simplicity
The ease of management and operational simplicity of the RingCentral platform has allowed Altronics to halve the number of hunt groups it has configured, and ensure the person who picks up the diverted call sees the originating details, helping them understand the context of the call. This wasn’t available in the Mitel platform. For example, that’s important when someone is calling Altronics’ Sydney office after hours, but a staff member in Perth answers.
“RingCentral made our call flows a lot easier and they were condensed down while achieving the same result and saving time if changes need to be made. We have saved hundreds of dollars per month moving to RingCentral,” said Delpech.
Since deployment, Altronics has enjoyed a secure, highly available and high-quality voice service thanks to RingCentral’s five 9s (99.999%) SLA, which equates to less than 78 seconds of downtime per quarter. Altronics is more easily managing its own environment with RingCentral’s administration portal, and now has access to advanced call reporting and analytics across the environment.
Investigating video and advocating for new platform features
While Altronics is currently only using RingCentral for voice communications, the business is investigating the use of video for internal meetings in the future. This is expected to enhance collaboration and reduce the geographic barriers of a business that operates in all mainland Australian states.
Altronics is also advocating for more advanced ‘do not disturb’ (DND) capabilities to be built into the RingCentral platform, where calls can be automatically diverted to another call queue if all members of the original hunt group are unavailable or set to DND. Similarly, Altronics would like to see users able to set different rules for their desk phone and their mobile app, so calls to specific queues don’t come through if they are out of the office or unavailable.
