Travelers Haven Fills Temporary Housing Needs Faster with RingEX™ and RingCentral Video

Travelers Haven originally switched to RingEX to gain flexibility. The company was already using RingCentral to send and receive faxes via email, and Jagd began investigating what other services RingCentral could provide.

Travelers Haven does not employ a receptionist to answer and route calls, instead relying on call queues to make multiple phones ring simultaneously until someone picks up. As the business expanded and the volume of incoming calls rose, Jagd was looking for a better way of making sure more of those calls would be answered and fewer would go to voicemail. After he saw a demonstration of how easily phone queues can be configured and managed in RingEX, Jagd realized how inadequate his company’s old phone system was in comparison. Seeing the advantages of a cloud-based phone system that would benefit from continual improvements, he began lobbying for a switch to RingCentral.

Then one day Jagd and CEO Elia Wallen were meeting off-site with a customer when the customer’s mobile phone rang. “She answered her office phone using the RingCentral app, and it was one of our employees calling to check with her on something,” Jagd says.

This spontaneous demonstration of the power of a programmable, mobile-friendly phone system made an impression, he says. “My CEO turned to me and said, ‘RingCentral? Isn’t that what you were saying we should be using?’”

Suddenly, any doubts about switching phone systems melted away and Travelers Haven soon made the switch to RingEX as its phone system. Next, the company added RingCentral Video team messaging and collaboration software. Because staff members already had RingCentral accounts and were using the RingCentral for Desktop softphone, they could sign into both with the same password while adding RingCentral Video features such as click-to-call dialing.

“It’s connected right into our phone system, so I don’t have to do a lot of extra management of RingCentral Video,” Jagd says. “Instead of having to send out an email saying, ‘John’s just been hired and here is his IM handle,’ now he’s automatically in the directory, and it’s done.”

RingCentral Video’s ability to share and collaborate around images also turned out to be a big advantage. A typical scenario might be sourcing a property for a specific need, where the request is to place a doctor in an apartment with upscale amenities that is within five miles of the client’s hospital. “The territory manager can send the account manager a quick message, saying, ‘Take a look at these pictures. I think they would really like this.’ If the answer is, ‘Yes, that looks fantastic,’ we can gather the rest of the information—but we are not wasting time sourcing apartments that the account manager knows aren’t going to fit.”

If the account manager or another team member has questions, RingCentral Video makes it easy to collaborate around visual information by attaching comments to specific regions of an image. For example, to point out damage to a couch in an apartment photo, you could click on the couch to add your note. Making the context clear speeds communication and eliminates misunderstandings, Jagd says.

Improving the efficiency of communications is particularly important in the context of sales, Jagd says. “We have analyzed our orders as they come in, and we can see that if we get a housing option to a client within 24 hours, the close ratio is almost 50 percent,” he explains. “If we get it to them after 24 but before 48 hours, it drops by 12 percent, and after 48 hours it drops by like another 20 percent. So the bottom line is, the quicker we can get an option in front of our client the more likely they are to accept it.”