Katz Media Group

Americas

But as Telecommunications Director Barbara Rossi points out, maintaining that familiar telephony environment for employees came at a price. “We had no companywide directory, and had to oversee and fix aging PBX hardware at every location. From an administrative standpoint, it was a challenge”

As Robert also explains, moving to a cloud-based unified communications platform would solve other efficiency challenges and cut costs. “We had many communication apps and vendor relationships—multiple phone systems and carrier contracts, different tools for video conferencing, and others for team chats. In addition to creating challenges keeping everyone connected, that infrastructure was also costing more than it should.”

RingCentral’s unified cloud platform proved invaluable from day one

Robert and Barbara were midway through Katz’s company-wide deployment of RingEX when the COVID pandemic broke out. As Robert explains, the sudden transition to remote work could have proved disruptive to a company whose headquarters was in one of the country’s hardest-hit cities.

“New York City officials were talking about closing bridges and restricting movements, which would have kept us locked out of our main office, where half of the company works. But because RingCentral let us put our business phone service, team messaging, and video conferencing on everyone’s phones and laptops, we didn’t need to worry about not being able to access our on-prem PBX. Our transition to remote work was basically seamless.”

Finding many ways to improve operations with RingCentral

Katz’s employees have used the company’s new unified communications platform in numerous ways to improve their productivity and daily workflows. As one example, Robert cites the benefits that Katz’s sales teams are enjoying with RingCentral.

“Most of our workforce are sales reps who spend a good portion of their days working with media buyers to build effective campaigns for ad agencies and their advertiser clients. Being able to take those calls on their work numbers—from anywhere—had a very positive effect on our responsiveness to clients and our sales teams’ ability to close business. This mobility was obviously essential during the lockdowns, but it would’ve added enormous value for our sales efforts even without COVID.”

Katz’s employees are also improving productivity and teamwork using RingEX’s built-in team messaging platform. John Iacono, Manager of Customer Support, explains that the messaging function is making it easier than ever for cross-functional teams to manage complex initiatives.

Extending the value of RingCentral with app integrations

Robert also notes that when he and his team researched the RingCentral App Gallery, they discovered even more ways to improve company operations. The Dropbox for RingCentral integration is one example, Robert explains. “What’s great about this integration is that it improves our everyday workflows in two important ways. We can easily share our Dropbox links in the RingCentral messaging platform, and we can automatically save our business voicemails from RingCentral to a shared Dropbox folder.”

Another integration that’s saving Katz’s employees a considerable amount of time and effort, Robert adds, is WebHooks for RingCentral.

“Our application development team uses the RingCentral WebHooks integration to automate the process of turning a development issue into a RingCentral team message. If an event in one of our apps triggers a notification, rather than sending that out as an email, it now goes straight into the RingCentral messaging group that our developers have open all the time. That’s a huge timesaver.”