One great thing about the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams integration is how seamless it makes our telephony in terms of setup and configuration. When I had to move a whole department into a new office in Florence, one thing I didn’t need to spend any time worrying about was phone service. It was already there for them, on their laptops and cell phones.
Darryl Baptiste
Vice President of Information Technology
The exclusive fragrance licensee for world-renowned brands
Inter Parfums, Inc. is one of the most successful and sought-after fragrance developers and distributors for prestigious brands worldwide. The company’s high-quality products have earned Inter Parfums exclusive global licensing partnerships with beloved fashion brands such as Montblanc, Coach, Jimmy Choo, Kate Spade, Oscar de la Renta, and MCM.
The company’s products regularly win industry awards for its brand partners, from such prestigious organizations as the Fragrance Foundation. And through its global distribution network, Inter Parfums sells its wide range of products in more than 120 countries.
Challenge: integrating a new, multi-country team into the company’s telephony environment
In late 2021, Inter Parfums acquired the fragrance division of fashion brand Salvatore Ferragamo. Most of that division’s employees were based in Ferragamo’s Florence offices, but several others lived or spent considerable time in Milan, Geneva, Hong Kong, and New York City.
Darryl Baptiste, Vice President of Information Technology, explains that his team needed to quickly integrate these new coworkers into the company’s telephony environment. But there were two obstacles.
“The first challenge was that those employees had to continue working out of the Ferragamo office while we set up a new Inter Parfums location for them in Florence,” says Darryl. “We couldn’t install traditional phone lines for our company at a Ferragamo location. Besides, we’d just have to move those lines almost immediately anyway.”
And there was a second challenge, Darryl explains. “A cloud phone solution—one capable of supporting us in all these countries—made the most sense. But those employees were already using Microsoft Teams for their internal messaging and video communications. We didn’t want to force them to use a separate app for their phone calls.”
Solution: the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams embedded dialer
Fortunately, Darryl had previous experience with RingCentral’s cloud phone solution and knew about RingCentral’s global telephony capabilities. He also knew that RingCentral integrates with Microsoft Teams—allowing users to call to contacts or extensions in their contact list and dial any external phone number from their Teams environment.
“The deployment was so easy,” Darryl says. “I called RingCentral, had them set up Italy-based numbers for all employees, ordered a few handsets for the new office, and had our account set up right there. And keep in mind, I did all this while sitting in my New York City office, with no understanding of how a telephony implementation like this works in Italy.”
Within days, Inter Parfums had a live, fully functioning cloud phone solution for each new colleague—with their own Italian business numbers that they could access on their computers and mobile phones anywhere in the world. “I uploaded all the employees’ information to our RingCentral user directory, sent out some instructions for using the RingCentral softphone and mobile apps and the Microsoft Teams integrations, and we were all up and running.”
RingCentral adds so much mobility for us. I travel a lot between New York and Florence, but I can be on business calls no matter where I am, using my laptop or even my own cell phone. Thanks to RingCentral’s softphone and mobile apps, my Inter Parfums business number travels with me everywhere.
Darryl Baptiste
Vice President of Information Technology
Results: RingCentral for Microsoft Teams generates huge benefits
As Darryl points out, implementing RingCentral has led to considerable operational improvements for the company.
For example, the global nature of the RingCentral environment has created new opportunities for Inter Parfums from a recruiting standpoint. “Because we can add business numbers for any region in the world, hiring in various countries will now be easier than it’s ever been from a telephony standpoint. That’s a huge operational advantage for a worldwide company like ours.”
Darryl also points out that RingCentral is helping his team drive Inter Parfums’ telecom costs lower. “With RingCentral, we won’t have onsite hardware to buy and upgrade. No more maintenance contracts, either. And we don’t need to worry anymore about communications downtime while we send someone out to repair an onsite phone system. In terms of total cost of ownership, RingCentral is clearly a money-saver in the long run.”
Finally, Darryl explains, one of the most valuable benefits of RingCentral is the flexibility that the solution gives the company’s employees.
For those who use Microsoft Teams, they now have a global cloud phone solution embedded right in their familiar Teams environment. And for those who don’t use Teams, they can easily access their RingCentral phone service using the softphone on their computer, the app on their cell phone, or—if they choose—the handset on their desk.
Darryl Baptiste
Vice President of Information Technology
