RingCentral’s interface is easier for both users and administrators, providing them a better experience.
Travis Luckey
Director of Technology, Stumptown Coffee
When some the world’s best cafés, bakeries, and restaurants serve your coffee and cold brew, you must be doing something right. That’s where Stumptown finds itself nearly 20 years since its founding.
In more recent years, this coffee roaster and retailer has grown steadily, opening cafés across the country so more consumers can access its fresh coffee and pioneering cold brew. It pairs this with a wholesale program that paves the way for independent cafés, grocery stores, and restaurants to offer its products.
Part of the third wave of coffee, Stumptown subscribes to the belief that coffee is an artisanal foodstuff. From its direct trade sourcing and micro-roasting to its skilled brewing and fresh delivery, Stumptown is committed to providing the freshest possible coffee.
While there’s an art to roasting coffee and producing cold brews, this company is anything but old-fashioned. In fact, its Director of Technology, Travis Luckey, has been leading Stumptown down a digital transformation path since joining in May 2017. As the company continues its steady growth, Luckey realized the need to include Stumptown’s phone system in the transformation plans. “My vision was to complete a 100% cloud migration for all critical systems, services, and phones, particularly those used by our two call centers, which are critical for Stumptown,” explains Luckey.
Recognizing the PBX as a liability
Luckey’s investigation revealed that Stumptown’s on-premises PBX located at headquarters was holding the company back. This system only delivered dial tone to all remote sites if the remote site had clean internet connectivity and an available VPN, and if headquarters had strong internet connectivity. In addition, the host PBX system had to be up and running. “Unfortunately, several of those components were unreliable, leading to multiple dial tone outages per quarter,” recalls Luckey.
Two Stumptown locations in Portland relied on MPLS private lines to get dial tone from headquarters. “That alone was costing us thousands of dollars per month,” continues Luckey.
To make matters worse, the complexity of the PBX’s interface led to IT staff-originated errors that negatively impacted users. The system’s command-line type interface meant IT administrators could easily make mistakes without realizing it. As a result, calls were sometimes routed to the wrong individual or voicemail box. In addition, the complicated interface made it time consuming to execute basic additions, changes, and moves. Exacerbating matters, users needed training to take advantage of basic functionality like programming speed dials, transferring calls, and setting up a three-way conference.
Enabling cost-effective reliability
Luckey addressed these shortcomings by making cloud-based RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center available across the organization. “I’ve spearheaded telephony migration projects at every company where I’ve worked. Having previously deployed RingCentral, I knew it was the best option for Stumptown,” Luckey explains.
The same reasons Luckey chose RingCentral in the past were just as compelling for Stumptown. He was impressed with the financially backed reliability in the form of a strong SLA. Moreover, he believes RingCentral’s interface is far ahead of competitive offerings. “RingCentral’s interface is easier for both users and administrators, providing them a better experience,” says Luckey.
Since replacing our on-premises PBX with RingCentral, we haven’t looked back. It was the right move for our growing business.
Travis Luckey
Director of Technology, Stumptown Coffee
Smoothly onboarding to a better experience
To augment Stumptown’s lean IT team, Luckey engaged the services of Matrix Networks, which specializes in deploying business technology solutions. Matrix Networks facilitated the RingCentral deployment by helping Luckey’s team with network readiness assessment and optimization. For example, it helped determine which existing POP and VoIP lines to move over and which to eliminate. According to Luckey,
Matrix Networks ensured the changeover went very smoothly, including integration with NetSuite ERP.
Stumptown is currently implementing Salesforce® CRM and anticipates integrating it with RingCentral. “That integration promises to be relatively simple compared with what would have surely been a costly, complex buildout using our old PBX,” says Luckey.
Paving the way for continued growth
Administrators can now make additions, changes, and moves in about half the time. Plus, because the RingCentral interface is intuitive, they don’t make mistakes in the process. That means users can receive and make calls as expected. Moreover, it’s intuitive for users to take advantage of all functionality.
While employees throughout the company take advantage of RingCentral tools and apps, the company is particularly excited about the impact on its burgeoning wholesale business. “We are partnered with thousands of wholesale customers around the country. With RingCentral, contact center agents can more easily and cost-effectively stay engaged with these partners to capture reorders and drive revenue growth. For example, RingCentral will automatically queue up outbound calls to different wholesalers when their stocks likely need replenishing, reminding them to top up their orders. “Since replacing our on-premises PBX with RingCentral, we haven’t looked back. It was the right move for our growing business,” concludes Luckey.
