Iowa 80 Group

Americas

“One of the biggest challenges was that we had no disaster recovery for our phones,” Rob says. “If our servers or network went down here at the Iowa headquarters, it could take down phone service completely. That posed an ongoing threat to our call center agents, many of whom we need to be accessible to customers literally 24/7.”

The other challenge, Rob explains, was that the complexity and fragility of the old system meant the company needed to pay consultants to administer it.

“We had a third-party company managing the system and another consultant just to help us make adjustments to things like our IVRs or call queues. It was that complicated.”

RingCentral brings cost savings, improved operations, and peace of mind

One of the main reasons Rob and his team chose RingCentral was the platform’s disaster recovery capabilities. The additional functionality and cost savings that RingCentral offered were important factors as well, Rob explains, but he knew his first responsibility was to ensure the company’s phone service was no longer vulnerable to a single point of failure.

“I read up on RingCentral and found that the company serves as its own carrier and has multiple data centers that are geographically distributed — all of which means that if there’s ever a problem, we can resume normal operations very quickly.”

But as Rob adds, the other benefits that drew his team to RingCentral have proven invaluable to Iowa 80 Group as well — particularly the Contact Center solution.

Unified communications adds efficiencies and lowers costs

Rob also notes that departments across Iowa 80 Group are finding ways to improve their workflows and become more accessible using RingCentral’s unified communications platform.

For example, Rob explains that RingCentral gives Iowa 80 Group employees added mobility and flexibility. “I was on a call with someone on my team who works in a different state, and in the middle of our conversation I flipped the call to my RingCentral mobile app, left my office, and started driving home. My coworker had no idea until I told him I was pulling into my driveway.”

But even with all of the new capabilities the company is enjoying, Rob points out that migrating to RingCentral has resulted in an overall savings on IT communications costs.

“We were paying about $2,000 a month for a digital faxing vendor, but we’ve eliminated that expense because it’s included with RingCentral,” he says, adding that this is just one of several cost-saving examples.

“We’re also no longer paying for in-house phone servers, or to have consultants manage our system, or even for the ridiculous costs to maintain our old analog lines. And of course, if we didn’t have RingCentral when the pandemic started, we would’ve had to pay yet another vendor for video conferencing licenses.”