Salary.com

Salary.com is one of the few genuine success stories to come out of the late-1990s dot-com era. Growing quickly into the top resource for compensation data and analytics tools, Salary.com’s early successes led to an IPO and then a series of mergers, with the company eventually becoming part of IBM.

When the founders bought the company back from IBM, Salary.com began again as a private startup. Remembering some of the operational challenges in the early days of “Salary.com 1.0,” the company looked for a cost-effective and scalable phone solution.

Looking for a phone solution that didn’t require much oversight

When they began rebooting “Salary.com 2.0,” the original founders knew exactly what they didn’t want in a business phone system.

“I was one of the original employees back when the company launched in 1999,” recalls Alicia Jaromin, now Salary.com’s Senior Helpdesk Network Engineer. “I remember dealing with phone issues every day when we had an on-premises phone solution. We had to do a lot of manual work, entering codes and memorized keystrokes to add users or make other changes. It was a huge drain on our resources.”

This time around, the executives decided to use a cloud-based phone system, one that would be largely self-managing and easily scalable. “Their research led them to RingCentral,” Jaromin says. “On reviewing the RingCentral system, it was easy to see why.”

RingCentral: the communications solution they wished they had 20 years ago

“I rejoined the new Salary.com just after they had signed up for RingEX, just in time to help roll out the new system,” explains Jaromin. “Getting the phones up and running across our small new company was quick, simple, and incident-free. It was such a relief to have phone infrastructure that just worked.”

Jaromin and her team experienced a similar benefit when they integrated a new location in Kansas City. “We acquired the office through an acquisition and had to bring the new team into the fold,” says Jaromin. “Those types of projects always create technology challenges. But I have to say, setting up RingCentral was one of the easiest aspects of that company integration. It was as simple as entering the employee’s info, asking our RingCentral team to ship out devices, and powering those devices up at the employee’s desks. And that was that.”

Enjoying many new communications benefits

Many employees are enjoying the peace of mind of knowing they can now do business using their business identity on personal mobile phones if they need to leave the office or work remotely but want to stay connected.

“Some of our employees really need to separate themselves from their work after hours, and that’s fine,” Jaromin explains. “But for those who want to be in the loop and accessible wherever they are, especially our remote workers, having the ability to conduct business calls anywhere, and to connect so easily using the RingCentral app, is great.”

The company also appreciates how cost-effective RingCentral is. “Our legacy systems were so costly,” says Jaromin. “Our capital expenditures included the on-prem phone servers, including new cards every time we wanted to add a new feature, proprietary wiring throughout the offices to each employee’s workstation, and the desk phones themselves, which each needed to be configured locally with no virtualization. Then there were the soft costs of IT’s time needed to administer and troubleshoot the phone service, which was time consuming because the systems were so complex and difficult to manage. With RingCentral, most of these costs are either much more manageable or gone altogether.”

The company’s sales team is benefiting from RingCentral’s Salesforce integration, which lets reps use a RingCentral pop-up in their Salesforce account to autodial a prospect’s number with a single click. “Our sales team also likes this tool because it lets them add real-time notes to the system during the call, and it automatically logs key details, so they don’t have to manually enter that data afterward.”

“We’re also getting a lot of benefit from the Performance Reports tool in RingCentral’s Analytics Portal,” Jaromin continues. “Several managers have set up regular emails to receive data on their teams’ call history and performance. I really appreciate the fact that RingCentral is so intuitive that our managers can do this themselves. In the past, they’d have to contact us to pull reports, and with our old phone system, that was an extremely time-consuming task.”

“And speaking of extremely time-consuming tasks, configuring phone trees and call queues used to be a nightmare with our previous phone systems. With RingCentral, tasks like these are so easy that I actually enjoy doing them.”