Car Benefit Solutions
Car Benefit Solutions Shifts its Operational Efficiencies into Overdrive with RingCentral
Rolling out RingCentral across the company was one of the easiest IT projects I’ve ever been involved in.
Martin Greenhalgh
Operations Development Manager
Blazing a new path to success in the car-benefit space
Car Benefit Solutions (CBS) is a leading provider of Employee Car Ownership Schemes in the UK. These innovative arrangements help businesses provide a cost-effective car benefit for both employers and their employees.
In the years since the company’s inception, more than 25 automotive manufacturers have partnered with CBS to create fully tailored Employee Car Ownership Schemes for their dealership network. CBS is also the employee car benefit provider of choice for some of the country’s most successful corporate organisations.
Today, CBS dominates the industry in a number of ways. The company’s solutions register more than 30,000 new cars each year, across hundreds of businesses, representing more than £1 billion in vehicle sales. The company has also won numerous awards for Customer Service Excellence and has earned an industry-leading Net Promoter Score of 93%—placing CBS in the “world-class” category.
But as CBS continued to grow—adding business customers, automotive partners, vehicle registrations, and staff to handle the increasing demand—the company’s customer teams continued running into the same IT challenge.
An on-premise PBX that was showing its mileage
All of CBS’s business phone calls ran through an outdated PBX sitting in the company’s headquarters. “The old system gave us inconsistent call quality, outages, and pretty much every other problem you can think of,” recalls IT Manager Steve Hall.
These challenges—which increasingly led to complaints from the company’s customer service department—prompted the CBS technology team to begin planning a migration to a more modern, cloud-based communications solution.
With RingCentral, we have communications options we never had before—like the CRM integration, the ability to get creative with call routing, and access to more granular call data and analytics.
Martin Greenhalgh
Operations Development Manager
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
HQ
Bury, Greater Manchester, UK
YEAR FOUNDED
2002
EMPLOYEES
150+
But as much as Martin, Steve, and the company’s customer teams wanted to move CBS to a more reliable and flexible phone system, they knew the internal approval process would take time. So, they continued to do the best they could with the PBX.
Then COVID dramatically sped up their timetable.
Finding the ideal communications solution for a remote workforce
As Martin explains, yet another shortcoming of CBS’s on-premise phone system was that it offered essentially no support for employees when they were out of the office. When the UK’s pandemic lockdowns went into effect, this became the top-priority challenge facing the company.
“At first, we tried redirecting inbound calls to temporary mobile phones that we gave to employees, but that created its own problems. Once we diverted a call off of our network, we lost control of it… so we couldn’t do another redirect or even see what was happening with the call. In those early lockdown days, we had no choice but to send some people back into the office to handle support calls.”
At the same time, though, Martin and Steve were hard at work researching cloud-communications providers—and RingCentral stood out across all of the categories that mattered to CBS.
“RingCentral ticked all of the key boxes for us—affordable cost, intuitive interface so our teams could manage the solution themselves, a professional team we felt confident in, and all of the functionality we needed,” says Steve.
As Martin notes, in addition to offering the capabilities CBS needed immediately—specifically enabling every employee to make and receive business calls on any computer or mobile phone—RingCentral also offered functionality the company knew it would want to implement over time.
“We didn’t want to switch to a new solution to get us through the lockdowns, but then realise later that as we needed more functionality, we’d have to either bolt-on other apps from different vendors or switch our whole system again.”
But the more Martin enquired about the RingCentral’s functionality, the more convinced he became that this was the future-proof solution CBS was looking for. “I asked about everything I could think of… Could we integrate RingCentral with our CRM? Would it integrate with our own internal apps? Did it offer automated dialers and other call-centre tools? In every case, the answer was yes.”
The most seamless IT migration the team can remember
“The Implementation and Professional Services teams were terrific,” says Steve. “Their training was great, and they were always there if we had any questions. The system was so easy that we were all up and running, as an entirely remote workforce, within a couple of weeks.”
Looking forward to improving more operations
As helpful as CBS found RingCentral to its operations right away, the company is even more enthusiastic about implementing more of the solution’s functionality as the company solidifies its post-pandemic operational plans.
As Martin explains: “With RingCentral, we have communications options we never had before—like the CRM integration, the ability to get creative with call routing, and access to more granular call data and analytics than we ever had.”
Steve adds: “We’re all grateful for how RingCentral helped us continue delivering great customer service during the lockdowns. But the team now is looking forward to seeing how else we can use the solution to improve our business - we know it will help us drive efficiencies through the extra data we see and the workforce management tools, which will be vital as we all move to a hybrid way of working.”
Finding a cloud phone system that checked all the boxes for functionality and mobility—which RingCentral did—wouldn’t have mattered if it weren’t also cost-effective enough that we could get management signoff.
Steve Hall
IT Manager