Being innovative has always been an important differentiator for tech companies—now it’s critical for survival. According to research from McKinsey, business leaders overwhelmingly believe COVID-19 will fundamentally change how they do business, creating new opportunities that will pave the way to post-pandemic recovery.
But many organizations feel ill-prepared to capture the moment. From what we know about innovation, that’s understandable. Innovation doesn’t have an on/off switch—it requires thought and planning, strategy, execution, and ongoing nurturing, just like any other business objective. As we head into 2021, with new vaccines and the promise of a world beyond COVID, now is the time for global technology companies to focus on how to better drive innovation.
In our Culture of Innovation series, we’ve done a deep dive into how global high-tech organizations can do just that, looking at both the key traits of a company culture that promotes innovation as a core business goal, as well as the everyday things that often stand in the way. Though every tech company innovates in unique ways, the factors that promote and undermine innovation are actually quite common—and both can be improved by employing the right communications tools.
Unified cloud communications support the needs of innovative companies while also removing barriers to forward thinking and execution. But don’t take our word for it. We’ve compiled some real-life high-tech examples of how RingCentral’s unified cloud messaging, video, and phone solution have helped our clients establish and support a culture of innovation. Here’s how they did it.
Global cohesion and seamlessness post-acquisition
Often the fastest path to bringing better services and products to customers is not to cultivate them internally but to acquire a complementary business. And so it was for Attraqt (LON: ATQT), which uses personalization, search, recommendations, internationalization, and merchandising SaaS solutions to power shopping experiences for leading retail brands. To better do this, they acquired an AI company based in France.
But acquisitions are frequently accompanied by innovation pitfalls. From disparate tools to the challenge of creating a common culture, there’s much standing between the successful marriage of two organizations and their ability to jointly innovate. For Attraqt, these obstacles were compounded by the company’s global expansion, from its birthplace in the U.K. to new offices in Germany, Australia, and elsewhere.
RingCentral relieved these pain points from the outset. “Because we have RingCentral, we will be able to scale up this business and onboard its staff much faster and with less friction than would’ve ever been possible before,” said David Phillips, Attraqt’s CIO. “For example, we’ll be able to integrate their phone numbers into the Attraqt system from our HQ, set them up with new emails, and get all of the staff’s communications set up almost instantly.
“Also, thanks to RingCentral, we’re easily able to communicate via video conferencing with the newly acquired team, which is helping onboard them and speed up their integration into our company,” Phillips said.
Propelling customer satisfaction via better employee engagement
For Geotab, an award-winning fleet management solution, providing top-notch communication and support to end-user customers is a critical differentiator. But outdated on-prem PBX systems, followed by a cloud communications solution that wasn’t up to the task, hindered their ability to offer innovative customer service.
“Unfortunately, we chose that first cloud solution in a hurry, and it just wasn’t advanced enough to handle our needs,” said Derek Carder, Geotab’s Vice President of Customer Experience and Technical Operations. “It couldn’t manage the complex routing instructions we needed to implement, track each caller’s position in the queue, offer a simple push-to-call-back feature, or provide the visibility we wanted into our call traffic.” Needless to say, these inefficiencies frustrated support center employees and made it more difficult to follow through on Geotab’s mission of helping customers simplify and optimize managing their fleets.
Not only could RingCentral handle Geotab’s complex needs, but it gave them everything they need to provide customer support that is truly cutting-edge. New capabilities include better call queues and push-to-call-back features, and—even more importantly—integrations and other features that improve visibility and make it easier for employees to work together.
“Our surveys indicated employee satisfaction with our previous communication tools was about 50%. But since rolling out RingCentral, that number has jumped to the 80% range,” Carder said. “Our support center employees really appreciate how intuitive the RingCentral system is. In Contact Center, the team-view dashboard lets our support staff see which calls are in the queue and what other people are working on, so they know when to jump in and help out a team member. Our supervisors can jump in, too. We’ve never had these capabilities before. All of this is invaluable because happy, engaged employees are a key contributor to Geotab’s success.”
Streamlining work to make room for innovation
One of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies in the world and an award-winning innovator, iBoss’ continued growth and success relies on its ability to fire on all cylinders. But its communications system—a legacy PBX system dating back to the company’s inception in 2003 and patchwork of other tools—wasn’t up to the task. With at least five different communications solutions in place, including two conferencing services and several chat applications, communicating was becoming increasingly complicated and unwieldy, whether the employees were both located in North American offices or spread out across iboss’ global markets.
Not only did RingCentral’s all-in-one platform remove the drag of collaborating remotely, but it fueled productivity and helped free up time for innovation by creating additional efficiencies via integrations with other business-critical apps. “Having RingCentral automatically pop up in Salesforce and Zendesk helps improve the productivity of our sales and support teams,” said Christopher Park, iBoss CIO. “It’s also a great way for us to see how much time an employee is on the phone, for example, or how much time a customer is taking up in support. The RingCentral reports are great, and it’s the integration that gives us that visibility.”
Paving the way to innovation with RingCentral
A clearly defined and communicated company vision. Winning employee experiences that are designed to reduce friction and wasted time, and make it easier to work together with colleagues—wherever they’re located. Business apps that work together, improving visibility and reducing silos. If innovation is on the roadmap, the clearest path is by finding tactics that provide all of these and other benefits in one.
As these examples show, the right communications platform sets the foundation for a culture of innovation. The seamlessness, ease of use, and scalability of RingCentral makes it more than a mere communications platform—think of it instead as the backbone of a truly innovative tech organization.
Originally published Dec 15, 2020, updated Dec 30, 2022
