after consolidating two phone systems eliminating hardware, and canceling separate Salesforce phone licenses
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unified platform for business phone, customer service call center, mobile communications, and even digital fax
When you consider how much more efficiently our whole company is running thanks to RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center, it’s hard to believe that we’ve also been able to consolidate and eliminate so many expenses that RingCentral is essentially paying for itself.
Bill Ogle
IT Director
A trusted wholesale building supplier for decades
For more than 30 years, Charter Industries has been helping cabinetry builders and other cased-goods manufacturers add beautiful finishes to their work – with high-quality edgebanding, T-molding, laminates, and other accessories for building surfaces and furniture.
The company has earned such a positive reputation among the building community that today Charter Industries has thousands of commercial customers across the US, maintains four strategically located warehouses around the country to serve those customers, and has been enjoying double-digit annual revenue growth for several years in a row.
Rapid growth was taxing an outdated phone infrastructure
Bill Ogle, Charter Industries’ IT Director, explains that for years the company’s telecommunications environment consisted of two disconnected phone systems – one for the company’s sales operation and another for all other employee calls.
“Most of our 150 employees are based in our Grand Rapids headquarters office, and before RingCentral they had desk phones and landlines,” Bill says. “For our sales department, we were using the native phone system in Salesforce.” As Bill points out, this telephony environment had several drawbacks.
“One problem was the two systems couldn’t connect, so we couldn’t transfer calls coming into our main number to our sales team’s Salesforce environment. We had to ask callers to hang up and redial a rep’s direct line. Another challenge was that we were using an old, on-prem system for our customer service team – and it just didn’t offer the functionality we needed to consistently deliver a great caller experience.”
But the most significant posed by Charter Industries’ previous telephony environment, Bill adds, was the lack of reporting and analytics capabilities, which left the company’s managers unable to monitor call trends, their teams’ performance, and other data that could help the company improve its operations.
RingCentral helps add efficiencies across the organization
By replacing the old, on-prem phone system with RingCentral, Charter Industries experienced several significant benefits immediately. The first, Bill says, was connecting employees at the company’s distribution centers more reliably than ever.
“Giving every employee full business phone capabilities through an app created some major improvements. For example, our warehouse locations weren’t connected to our old phone system, which made contacting those employees difficult. With RingCentral, now we’re able to easily reach them if, for example, a customer is on their way to the facility to pick up a product.”
But perhaps the most significant improvement, Bill notes, was finally being able to give the sales department the ability to make and receive customer calls directly in their Salesforce environment, using the RingCentral for Salesforce integration.
We’ve seen massive benefits from our RingCentral Salesforce integration. Our reps can now take and make calls just by clicking the customer’s number right in Salesforce, and they can see that customer’s profile and history during the call. Plus, because telephony is now integrated across our company, these sales reps’ call logs will be visible to our customer service agents if that customer calls them.
Bill Ogle
IT Director
Bill also points out that because the RingCentral app and Salesforce integration both allow for business calls anywhere, on any device, Charter Industries has been able to allow employees, including sales reps, to stay connected and productive from anywhere.
“Because the old system really forced us to be in the office to make or receive a call on our work numbers, our sales reps were tied to their desks, or they had to give out their personal cell numbers. With RingCentral, though, we’ve actually been able to allow for a several-day-a-week work-from-home arrangement – something we could never do efficiently before.”
RingCentral Contact Center helps improve the customer experience
Charter Industries found such success after implementing RingEX (Message, Video, Phone) as its organization-wide business phone solution that the company decided to move its customer service department onto RingCentral Contact Center. That move, Bill says, led to all sorts of additional improvements for the company.
“From a customer service standpoint, we’ve heard that callers appreciate the new options we can give them thanks to RingCentral Contact Center – like periodically hearing an update about where they are in the queue and being able to ask for a callback if they’d rather not wait.”
But as Bill adds, what has proven even more beneficial to the customer service operation is the wealth of call data available in RingCentral Contact Center, which gives the department managers full visibility into how many calls the company is receiving per day, how agents are performing in terms of meeting the company’s SLAs, what calls are active at any given moment, and key call trends.
Our customer service managers can really see everything in RingCentral Contact Center’s reporting dashboards. And using all those new insights, we’ve been able to speed response times, route callers to the right people more quickly, and enact other improvements that have led directly to an improved customer experience.
Bill Ogle
IT Director
Keeping telecom costs manageable
Bill also points out that even though the RingCentral implementation has led to significant new capabilities, Charter Industries is not spending any more on telecommunications than it was with its previous, feature-poor telephony environment.
Citing one example, Bill explains that the customer service team has been able to deliver an outstanding caller experience to its steadily increasing number of customer inquiries even after one of its agents switched to a new department.
“We had a customer service agent get promoted to the sales team, which left us short-staffed for service calls,” Bill says. “But because we now had RingCentral’s callback option and advanced routing features, our managers realized we were still providing outstanding service to callers and didn’t need to backfill that open position. We now know we can continue handling larger call volume without hiring more agents – and a big part of that is RingCentral Contact Center.”
And that’s not the only way RingCentral is helping Charter Industries keep its telecom costs low, Bill explains.
Between no longer managing phone hardware and landlines, being able to eliminate those separate phone licenses for our Salesforce environment, and replacing those costly headsets our old phone system needed to work, RingCentral is actually helping us save money on our communications costs.
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