Conair

“The old phone system was very limited,” he says. “We could have only so many employees accessing voicemail at the same time. We were also limited in how much voicemail content the system would store. And other than simply dialing out, the phones offered basically no useful functionality.”

Eric points out the most significant drawback of the legacy system was its limited administrative functionality. “Adding, moving, and changing users in the phone system required us to involve the vendor. In fact, it was such an undertaking that we had to set aside 20% of one IT employee’s time—the equivalent of a day every week—just to deal with those simple requests.”

A call center solution also creating challenges

While the IT team was investigating cloud phone solutions for the Conair associates, the company’s international Customer Service teams were facing similar issues with their contact center solutions. The company’s two main customer services groups, UK and France, used a different end-of-life contact center system.

Matt Jansen, Conair’s Customer Service Manager for UK & France, explains that these systems limited the teams’ ability to provide the best possible experience. “Because our contact center systems were essentially standard phone systems—not cloud based—our agents and managers missed a lot of functionality. We couldn’t integrate our solution into Salesforce, for example, and our managers had very little visibility into call-volume trends or agent performance.”

By migrating employees’ phone service to the cloud-based RingEX, and Customer Service operations to RingCentral Contact Center, Conair solved all these problems—and unleashed efficiencies and productivity levels well beyond what the company expected.

RingEX boosts’ employee productivity—and morale

As Eric points out, RingCentral freed Conair’s staff from a reliance on office desk phones and gave them the mobility to take and make business calls anywhere, using RingCentral apps on their laptops and cell phones. That, he says, has led directly to an increase in communication, collaboration, and productivity.

“Now that we’re all in a shared cloud environment, we can reach our coworkers in other locations as easily as if we were dialing them internally. And whereas our old system offered zero remote capability—meaning employees were tied to their desks—now it’s easy for us to have business calls or meetings no matter what device we have, and no matter where we are.”

Gaining so much added convenience and flexibility over their previous telephony infrastructure, Eric explains, has also boosted employee morale.

“With our old phone solution, employees’ satisfaction with their communication tools hovered around 40%. That’s one of the reasons we went looking for a better solution. Since we’ve moved to RingCentral, I’d estimate that number is up in the 90% range. In other words, this switch has given us happier, more motivated employees.”

The world-class call center solution Conair’s Customer Service team wanted

As Matt points out, the RingCentral migration has also yielded significant benefits for Conair’s Customer Service department—and, ultimately, the company’s customers around the world.

“RingCentral Contact Center is helping us improve literally every aspect of our operations, from hiring to agent performance to business intelligence to the overall customer experience,” Matt says.

“Because we’re now managing our entire Customer Service department through a central, cloud-based phone system, we have more flexibility than ever in where we can have agents working. That means we can bring on agents to work remotely in time zones that let us extend our hours of operation—which is what we’re planning to do next. And that means providing better service to our customers around the world.”