The biggest benefit we’ve seen with RingCentral is its reliability. It just works.
Tony Kartono
IT Manager
Parkerville upgrades to RingCentral to future-proof communications
Parkerville Children and Youth Care (“Parkerville”) is a registered charity that has been helping children and families for over 120 years. Parkerville provides advocacy, services and supports to children, young people and families to reduce the impacts of child abuse and in doing so help Western Australia to become the safest place in the world to bring up children. Committed to developing innovative and culturally safe services in partnership with the government and other not-for-profit organisations, Parkerville operates from more than 20 locations in WA running advocacy centres; therapeutic services; education, employment and training programs; and residential care facilities.
Connectivity to all sites is via a Cisco Meraki cloud-managed secure SD-WAN together with a managed unified communications service based on Microsoft Teams. However, Parkerville had recurring problems particularly with external Teams voice calls where clients couldn’t hear the audio, so Parkerville staff would have to call back – not ideal for an organisation often dealing with stressful and highly emotional family situations. On top of that, troubleshooting and support for the service was lacking.
“Every time we had a problem with Teams, it was two jumps; we had to coordinate with our managed services provider, who then had to coordinate with their providers. It could take up to three weeks for the problem to be resolved,” said Tony Kartono, IT Manager, Parkerville Children and Youth Care.
After seeking recommendations for a replacement unified communications solution, Parkerville selected RingCentral RingEX after a demonstration of the cloud-based platform’s features and functionality.
“We were impressed with RingCentral’s features, especially in managing calls and the ease of administering the backend. What intrigued us most were the potential integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and RingCentral’s AI and voice analysis capabilities, especially in the way it could support the services we provide to people over the phone,” said Tony.
Reliable and easy to administer
Since switching over to RingCentral, all of the issues Parkerville had with Teams have disappeared. “The biggest benefit we’ve seen with RingCentral is its reliability. It just works,” said Tony.
Parkerville has also found it much easier to configure and manage the system, such as out of office settings, auto attendant functions, hunt groups and IVRs.
Switching to RingCentral has been cost-neutral for Parkerville, but the new solution has given the organisation access to a wider range of features.
“We’ve picked up a lot more features with RingCentral without having to pay more for them,” said Tony.
We’ve picked up a lot more features with RingCentral without having to pay more for them.
Tony Kartono
IT Manager
Integration with Teams
Parkerville is still using Teams for internal collaboration, so apart from its reception team, all other staff are using the RingCentral App for Microsoft Teams. That’s eased the change management process for the organisation.
“Most of our users aren’t very technical, so it’s great that they can still use the same familiar interface, and they don’t need to learn something new,” said Tony.
The move to RingCentral’s native cloud platform aligns with Parkerville’s digital transformation journey, which should see the complete removal of all IT infrastructure hardware by end of the 2024 financial year.
Future CX innovation
Now that Parkerville has a reliable and high-performing voice platform in place, it will be looking to implement additional functionality in the system to enhance its client experience (CX).
“We are looking into RingCentral analytics to generate reporting for the business on our call volumes and activity, average time to answer, peak calling times, calls missed or abandoned, and more,” said Tony.
Parkerville is planning to integrate RingCentral with Microsoft Dynamics 365, which Parkerville uses as its client management system. While the project is still being scoped out, at the minimum it will enable Parkerville to automatically log any calls made or received with that client’s record.
Parkerville is also excited by the potential of RingCentral’s AI and voice analytics capabilities. The organisation is investigating its use for sentiment analysis, AI prompts for Parkerville counsellors and carers, and call transcriptions, which will all be dependent on the organisation first establishing a robust information governance framework.
