Our legacy phone system was creating serious challenges to our operations—in terms of functionality, remote work capabilities, and optimizing service for our members. Moving to RingCentral helped solve all those issues. In fact, now we’re able to start thinking about how to use our new cloud telephony capabilities to help us grow.
Turhan Hunt
Vice President of Member Services
The largest credit union headquartered in California’s Riverside County
For more than half a century, Southern Californians looking for financial services with lower fees and more personalized service than those offered by conventional banks have been turning to their neighbors at Altura Credit Union.
The largest credit union based in Riverside County, Altura offers a full suite of banking services—credit cards, home loans, auto loans, checking and savings accounts, investment services, you name it—to more than 160,000 members in counties across Southern California.
The community-based credit union’s reputation for outstanding service—Altura earned a 96% member satisfaction rate in 2020—has helped the organization attract more members year after year. But Altura’s standards for member service are extremely high, and its aging telephony infrastructure simply couldn’t continue meeting those standards.
A legacy phone system that was falling short in several ways
Turhan Hunt, Vice President of Member Services for Altura, runs the credit union’s contact center. As he explains, Altura’s on-prem phone system, which was at least 15 years old, was already showing its limitations when the credit union was serving 80,000 members. But by the time that number had doubled to 160,000, Altura’s contact center teams—as well as the rest of the organization—knew it was time for a more modern phone system.
“Because we’re a member-focused organization, the biggest driver for us to upgrade our telephony was to improve our contact center operations,” Turhan says.
The old system had serious limitations—for example, not allowing our managers to monitor agent performance with any granularity. Also, the system really didn’t support our agents working remotely, which obviously became a challenge with the COVID lockdowns.
Turhan Hunt
Vice President of Member Services
Nor was the contact center the only department that needed a more flexible and feature-rich telephony solution. “Making simple changes like updating our automated greetings was a cumbersome process, which created challenges anytime one of our 20 branches wanted to add or change an announcement for callers. The system also made it difficult for our branches and administrative departments to set up call queues and monitor their own call traffic.”
RingCentral Contact Center helps uncover invaluable business intelligence
When they rolled out the cloud-based RingCentral Contact Center, Turhan notes, Altura’s member support operation added flexibility and capabilities it never had before.
To cite one example, RingCentral Contact Center solved a serious challenge affecting Altura’s agents’ ability to work remotely. “With RingCentral, we can now record every member call, no matter where our agents are, and automatically store the recording securely in the cloud.”
But perhaps most important for the organization’s mission to continually improve its member experience, RingCentral helped Altura unlock a tremendous amount of business intelligence.
“What I found most exciting about RingCentral Contact Center was the ability to track and analyze the granular details of our members’ calling experience. Our old system basically gave us one number—you had 51,000 calls in April. What process improvements could we make with that information? Not many.” But, Turhan adds, with RingCentral, Altura now has those granular details—and his team is beginning to use them to enhance the member experience.
With RingCentral’s analytics tools, now we can monitor our callers’ journeys and learn what options they’re selecting, how long it takes to connect them to the right expert, whether they’re choosing the callback option rather than wait on hold, and what if any pain points they encounter. That level of visibility—which we’ve never had—is going to help us continually make Altura’s service better for our members.
Turhan Hunt
Vice President of Member Services
Improving operations with RingCentral’s unified communications
While Turhan was rolling out RingCentral Contact Center for Altura’s member support teams, the rest of the organization was migrating to RingCentral’s cloud-based unified communications solution. That platform—RingEX—gives employees messaging, video conferencing, and business phone capabilities in a single app they can access on any computer or mobile device.
“I’m hearing from other departments that people really appreciate the RingCentral app,” says Turhan. “It’s giving them so much functionality they didn’t have before—starting with the ability to use their work numbers from anywhere, but also the ability to have video calls with colleagues and to collaborate using the messaging and file-sharing features.”
Creating more efficiencies with RingCentral’s app integrations
As Turhan also notes, he and his colleagues are finding additional ways to improve workflows with integrations they’ve discovered in the RingCentral App Gallery. One example, he explains, is RingCentral Pulse for Contact Centers.
“One of the other teams in our contact center department does outbound loan servicing calls. For that team, inbound calls are often payment arrangement calls, so they need to be answered right away. My colleague implemented the RingCentral Pulse integration, which lets him flag inbound calls as top-priority and automatically have them routed to the right group of agents. That’s a great feature for that team, and it’s a good example of how we expect to keep finding more ways to make our telephony environment better with RingCentral integrations.”
Not a great agent resignation–a great agent rejuvenation
Finally, Turhan points out, Altura now has a telephony solution that’s improving rather than hindering operations. The organization is beginning to evaluate more ways to use RingCentral and RingCentral Contact Center to enhance other areas of the business.
To cite a key example: The company’s ever-expanding member roster and busy contact center have also led to demand for more support agents to help members by phone. And because RingCentral allows for remote agents to work seamlessly as a team, no matter where they’re located, Altura can now recruit and hire the best agents anywhere.
In fact, whereas other companies are experiencing a great agent resignation, Altura is enjoying a great agent rejuvenation.
RingCentral gives us so much flexibility and functionality that we’re able to think about growth-oriented processes we hadn’t before—like adding contact center agents at our branches, setting up hybrid office space, and creating a more data-oriented coaching program for agents. Our old phone system kept us reactive. With RingCentral, we’re now able to make proactive moves that will help us grow.
Turhan Hunt
Vice President of Member Services
