Highlights:
- Today’s businesses compete on a global scale. Succeeding requires seamless communication across the entire organization
- Too many local telecom providers and on-premises systems add unnecessary costs and complexity to your business
- Here are the most common challenges global businesses (and those going global) face, and how companies can overcome them with Global Office
For businesses, operating on a global scale does more than just open up new opportunities. Global businesses can serve customers around the world while benefiting from important business advantages such as cost savings and access to wider talent pools.
But despite all the advantages, staying competitive on a global scale has its own challenges, especially when it comes to communications. Here are six common business problems, and how a global UCaaS solution can help:
Challenge 1: Silos between different offices and regions
With different carriers and technical communications requirements in each market, working with local telecom providers might seem like the simplest way to bring new locations online. But the resulting patchwork of tools makes it harder for offices to talk to each other, in all senses.
The more steps it takes to connect with coworkers in other regions, the more information sharing and collaboration become an afterthought. Ultimately, this creates silos and blind spots that can result in missed opportunities and overlooked information.
To leverage the full power of a global workforce, communications need to bridge the physical distance between offices. And phone alone won’t cut it. Employees need a simple, universal solution that provides messaging, video, and phone in order to facilitate teamwork at a global scale. At the same time, communication tools need to be accessible and familiar to users in each individual market or they’ll be disinclined to use them.
Our solution:
Communication is at the heart of keeping an entire organization in sync. It’s the lifeline for employees who must depend on their teams— often scattered among regional offices—to get work done.
Ideally, every employee should have access to the exact same communications tools as their colleagues three time zones away with equal ease. Employees should also have device flexibility, or the freedom to switch from phone to computer and other mobile devices easily—whether by voice, text, web meeting, or collaboration.
Global Office®, our global UCaaS solution, provides a unified user experience that both meets the needs of individual offices and global organizations as a whole. With a single user interface for messaging, video meetings, and phone, all employees can use the same tools—and seamlessly collaborate with other users—regardless of their location. And with the ability to personalize their accounts, such as localization in 16 languages, users have a familiar, locally accessible experience wherever they’re located—encouraging adoption.
Challenge 2: Delivering local customer experiences
Operating globally is naturally at odds with what customers typically want: a local experience. Whether it’s dialing a local number to reach a company or customer service representatives who speak their language, customers want to work with businesses that provide experiences that are familiar and personalized.
Our solution:
A global communications solution like Global Office resolves this apparent conflict, providing local customer experiences wherever your business operates.
For example, RingCentral Contact Center™ and Global Office can support agents in multiple locations and in multiple languages. By integrating directly with various customer relationship management (CRM) tools and customer support software, passing off support-related tasks to agents in other locations is simple.
Similarly, our choice of over 100+ International Virtual Numbers (IVNs) and International Toll-Free numbers allow customers to call a local number to reach you, without having to worry about international dialing fees.
Challenge #3: Setbacks of on-premises infrastructure
Many global businesses use an on-premises PBX at every location, but those come with their own set of challenges. The first is cost. Businesses have to contend with high per user costs, on top of dedicated office space and trained IT personnel to manage the systems. Add on the cost of international calls just to reach other locations, and the numbers can be astronomical—especially for multinational companies.
The second is communication. The proprietary nature of on-premises PBX means that different locations can’t seamlessly communicate with each other. If employees have to jump through costly and tedious hoops just to reach colleagues in another location, they’ll default to working in silos and isolation.
Our solution:
Moving to the cloud can ease these expensive and often redundant costs. Because Global Office is built on pure cloud infrastructure, businesses can leave all of the maintenance, upkeep, and software updates to us. And with our quarterly release cycles, that means regular, new, and innovative features for your users, automatically. A cloud-based communications system also eliminates the need for dedicated, on-site technical personnel.
What’s more, each Global Office license comes with 1,000 minutes per user, per month, which can be used to call local and mobile numbers in any country within your Regional Calling Zone. These minutes are pooled together with your other lines, offering substantial international call savings across your company.
Challenge #4: Complex vendor management and billing
Having to manage different vendors in each market (and often different vendors for phone, video, and other types of communications), adds cost and complexity every step of the way. Imagine having to reach out to several providers just to provision new users, change a user’s password, or troubleshoot issues. Managing payments to so many vendors just makes accounting a herculean task.
Our solution:
With Global Office, there’s just one predictable monthly invoice to pay and one provider to contact for support—reducing much of the complexity of operating on a global scale. You can easily create a hierarchical structure of billing codes by department or location with our Cost Center Management feature, making it simple to understand and assign costs throughout your global business.
Challenge #5: Streamlining IT delivery
Maintaining communications systems at multiple locations—especially if every site uses a different provider—can be a management nightmare for IT. Ordering numbers and porting requires contacting support every time. Maintenance has to be scheduled with providers and downtime needs to be accounted for. Skilled network engineers and resources are required. These tasks can often take weeks or even months.
Our solution:
By nature, the cloud model places the burden of maintaining UCaaS technology on the service provider. From deployment headaches to responding to emergencies, the communications provider ensures that your systems stay online—with 99.999% SLA reliability in RingCentral’s case—and troubleshoots when things go wrong.
RingCentral’s network was built from the ground up to ensure the high-quality, scalable, and secure service necessary to support unified communications between globally distributed offices, employees, and customers. We’ve established our own backbone and developed our own peering relationships to provide carrier-grade reliability and quality of service.
Businesses with Global Office can manage users globally from one location: the Admin Portal. RingCentral’s centralized admin capabilities make it easy to manage all aspects of the system from one location. A single interface allows administrators to manage number porting and ordering, add or make changes to devices and users, and even to add new locations to the system remotely from a single account.
Our convenient multi-site support feature empowers you to provision independent account configurations to your sites, uniquely registering each of your sites so you can individually manage them within your account.
Challenge #6: Expanding into new regions
When it comes to deploying communications, opening a new office can be both legally and logistically complex. Most countries have their own telecom regulations, with unique requirements around everything from data collection and privacy to hardware and emergency calling access.
Navigating all of these requirements—along with negotiating and onboarding new vendors—can slow the process of entering a new market by weeks, if not months. What’s worse, not complying with local regulations can lead to service interruption or even losing access to your phone numbers—which could seriously impact your business.
Our solution:
RingCentral makes the act of going global significantly easier. As global communications experts, RingCentral has done all the legwork, providing regionally compliant phone numbers, emergency service support, and hardware that meets local power requirements, in 40+ countries.
Breaking down borders with Global Office
The key to operating on a global scale is to connect all of your offices so it feels like everyone is in the same office. Strong communications mobilizes your employees to stay engaged and united, while reinforcing your established corporate culture. There’s no reason to lose that tight focus simply because your existing PBX system can no longer sustain the breadth of your broader organization.
With Global Office, you get a consistent, all-in-one voice, messaging, and collaboration experience that truly supports your multinational workforce and global customer base. We handle all aspects of your global communication so you can focus on your business.
Originally published Mar 17, 2021, updated Jan 30, 2023
