Experiencing recurring blackouts can be a hassle for any business. And losing power is even more problematic if your phone system goes down along with the lights.
These issues are all too real in some very hot parts of the country, including California’s Riverside County. Advertising company REVShare, headquartered in Temecula, Calif., has to shut down its whole office on the hottest summer days (when blackouts are most likely to occur).
With the old on-premise phone system that REVShare was running, that meant that telephone communication with clients and networks was done for the day because employees were cut off from their business phone numbers.
REVShare specializes in cost-per-action television advertising. The company does business with more than 1,700 national and local-market television stations, cable systems, syndicators and networks.
Along with the periodic outages, REVShare ran into other problems with its on-premise phone system. Every time REVShare wanted to add new features, such as call forwarding or a mobile app, doing so required additional fees.
“It was end-of-life for our on-premise phone system. We never had 99 percent uptime, the software crashed, the system would overheat and it was taking up a lot of rack space in our server room,” explains James Enriquez, system administrator at REVShare.
Often, with the old on-premise phone system, James would get requests to change, disable or remove features like call forwarding, IVR, and re-routing. Even as an IT person, James struggled to figure out settings with the old system.
But all that has changed, now that REVShare is using RingCentral Office. “Now, our employees are empowered, almost all of them use the RingCentral app and can make changes by themselves,” James says. “It is saving me a couple of hours a week, and has simplified things immensely.”
This same feature gives REVShare the ability to connect employees that aren’t working on-site. “We have some remote employees that live out of the state and work from home. Now that we have RingCentral, they are able to use their work numbers at home, which wasn’t possible with our previous system,” says James.
REVShare is saving $800 on its monthly phone bill, empowering employees and benefiting from features that it didn’t previously have. “Our employees like that they don’t have to share their personal numbers. We’ve created an auto-receptionist and we use conference calling, as well. Overall the switch has been flexible and reliable,” explains James. “We would never look at going back to an expensive and complicated on-premise phone system. We all love our RingCentral system.”
Originally published Oct 22, 2013, updated Aug 20, 2021
