Highlights:
- Savings: Migrating to RingCentral led to a 50% cost reduction by consolidating telecom vendors, gaining better visibility over usage, reducing administration effort and lowering the organization’s other telecom charges.
- Service: Being able to direct calls from clients anywhere, to staff anywhere, means the company can quickly provide fast support to clients in their moment of need.
- Teamwork: Deploying RingCentral Video across the company is resulting in richer, more meaningful internal communications and improving team bonding.
A trusted Canadian insurance provider for decades
Calling your insurance claims adjuster is rarely a happy occasion—particularly if your insurance loss impacts your home and/or loved ones.. But when you do have to make one of those traumatic calls, knowing you’ll receive outstanding, attentive service from an adjuster who cares makes all the difference in an insurance claims experience.
In fact, SCM attributes its success—the company has become the largest independent provider of claims management services in Canada—in no small part to its reputation for unparalleled client service. To cite just one example, the Canadian Insurance Business Organization has named SCM the country’s “Best Service Provider.”
But as SCM expanded, both organically and through acquisitions, the company’s telephony infrastructure became increasingly disjointed, making it difficult to keep the organization’s growing staff connected to each other or able to provide a consistently high-quality service to clients. The technology team’s search for a better solution led them to the unified, cloud-based communications platform RingCentral MVP (Message, Video, Phone).
Making the staff more mobile, accessible, and productive than ever
When they rolled out the unified RingCentral MVP, SCM finally had a consistent communications system and user experience for all employees—for the first time. The company’s claims adjusters were now able to take and make calls on their SCM business numbers whether they were at their desks or in the field. This made it easier than ever to be responsive to clients and deliver outstanding service.
In fact, RingCentral also provided a benefit largely unique to the insurance industry, particularly for helping clients through major disasters. As Chief Information Officer Mike Ackroyd notes, whenever a geographic region experiences a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, flood or wildfire, that triggers an enormous spike in calls to insurance companies.
During a catastrophic event, the speed and responsiveness of claim handlers can mean everything to the victims. When a weather event requires mobilization of claims adjusters from across the country, the ability to easily equip adjusters with a local phone number goes a long way to let our clients know the person helping them is nearby too. With RingCentral MVP enabling the company to set up employees with a phone number local to the disaster region, SCM is in a better position than ever to provide fast, personal support to its clients when they need it most.
As Mike points out: “Now we can quickly spin up local numbers for any region affected by a disaster. We can mobilize our staff to support that area—and give the victims reassurance that they’re getting help from someone close by.”
Lowering SCM’s telephony expenses
Mike also explains that by consolidating SCM’s disjointed telephony infrastructure—consisting mainly of on-prem phone systems and local service agreements from local carriers—his team has managed to significantly lower the company’s overall IT communications expenses.
“We’ve reduced our costs by 50% by removing dormant phone numbers and getting our expenses for toll-free and long-distance charges back under control,” Mike says. “That’s delivering significant savings for SCM Insurance Services.”
Improving team cohesion with RingCentral Video
When Mike deployed RingCentral Video across the company, he says, he saw employees finding ways to use the video conferencing platform in several ways to improve their workflows.
“Because RingCentral Video makes it so easy to schedule a video call, or just start one on the fly, we’re using it across the board for our team meetings and even talks with clients,” he says. “Those video calls are making our communications so much richer and more meaningful—which matters now more than ever.”
When Joseph Lalla, SCM’s VP of IT Support Services, began using RingCentral Video to create ‘Office Hours’—essentially a digital open door for his staff to speak with him about anything—he found yet another team-building benefit from RingCentral.
“My team appreciates being able to connect face-to-face in an informal setting, something we haven’t been able to do much since COVID.”, Joseph says. “In fact, the first person who joined my RingCentral Video office hours was an employee I hadn’t been able to visit for some time. He just wanted to chat, catch up, and regain that sense of team. So that’s what we did.”
Originally published Sep 23, 2021, updated Dec 30, 2022
