We find throughout the funeral industry most staff tend to make calls to customers using their own mobile phone, so if they leave, they have an opportunity to take a client base with them. For us, we needed a solution that would help to keep all our customer communications in-house.
Mark Coates
Founder and Director, Redwood Funerals
Four in one
Operating four separate businesses on one telephony platform
Flexibility and mobility
Enabling greater flexibility and mobility for team members
Improving CX and data protection
Setting telephony policies to improve customer experience and protect customer data
Responsiveness
Better responsiveness across all four businesses
Based in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Redwood Funerals (“Redwood”) is a family-owned and operated funeral director offering its services to the greater Melbourne metro, Mornington Peninsula and throughout Victoria. The company prides itself on delivering unmatched experiences for its customers and also operates three other related businesses - Victorian Coffins & Caskets, Deceased Transport Solutions and The Essential Cremation Co. However, with a workforce operating from a range of out-of-office locations, Redwood resorted to staff carrying multiple mobile phones to stay in contact with its customers.
“We needed a telephony solution where we could have everything centralised, but also gave us more flexibility with new team members coming on board,” said Mark Coates, Founder and Director, Redwood Funerals.
Redwood wanted to provide a differentiated customer experience for each of its businesses. As an example, it was important that calls to the funeral business are answered in person, but that’s not always possible if a team member is currently attending a service – so Redwood needed a solution that would ring other team members to ensure the customer could speak to someone immediately.
Redwood also needed to protect its most valuable asset – its customers.
“We find throughout the funeral industry most staff tend to make calls to customers using their own mobile phone, so if they leave, they have an opportunity to take a client base with them. For us, we needed a solution that would help to keep all our customer communications in-house,” said Coates.
Four businesses representing a communications challenge
Redwood deployed RingCentral RingEX, a cloud-based unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform.
Redwood’s team members access the full features of the platform via the RingCentral app that they can run on either a company-provided mobile or their own personal device.
Redwood was using 1300-number services as the contact point for its businesses, with those numbers forwarding to mobiles. Those numbers were ported to RingCentral and the system configured to connect them to different hunt groups, which means multiple people can pick up the call. Separate recorded after-hours messages have been created, and operational hours and rules put in place for each business number.
“The RingCentral app is a really valuable tool. I can easily put someone on hold, transfer the call, or conference someone else in. The other day, I had a customer query about a delivery, so I said, ‘I’ll just connect our delivery driver to the call’. I connected the driver and sorted out the issue on the spot,” said Coates.
RingCentral’s platform also demonstrated its flexibility recently with Redwood bringing on a new crew to work day shift in its transport business. Buying a new mobile phone for the van, Coates was able to set up the phone and download the RingCentral app, create a new login and assign a telephone number via the RingCentral Admin portal, ready for use the following day.
Customer experience improvements and greater flexibility
By switching from the 1300 services to RingCentral, Redwood has slightly reduced its monthly telephony costs but with the added benefits of a better customer experience and greater flexibility and mobility for its team. Also, as the business expands, it will be much easier and more cost-effective to provision new users’ phone extensions.
“RingCentral has the scope to grow with us. As we bring new people on board, we don't need to buy them all mobile phones. We can pay them a certain percentage every month to have the app on their own phone. We have a policy that all work calls must be made through RingCentral, so we’ve got a record of all those calls and our customer base is secure as well,” said Coates.
“My biggest scepticism was the fact that we're moving to an app-based solution, and is it going to work all the time? RingCentral is giving us what we need, and it works all the time,” said Coates.
With the RingCentral system only recently deployed, Redwood is still considering how the platform’s features could be extended beyond telephony.
“We have just started having team meetings and sending all internal communications via the app, but having the ability to send text messages externally is one feature we hope to see in the future,” said Coates.
