Highlights:
- Added mobility: With RingCentral apps on their laptops and mobile phones, Conair’s employees can now—for the first time ever—take and make work calls from anywhere.
- Improved service: Thanks to Contact Center, Conair’s Customer Service managers now have the right tools and data to monitor and improve the customer experience.
- Increased morale: Since migrating to RingCentral’s cloud communications, Conair’s employee satisfaction with their telecom system jumped from 40% to more than 90%.
The company behind household-name brands sold in 120 countries
That company that introduced the industry-defining pistol-grip hair dryer, Conair LLC has gone on to create hundreds of innovative products under both the Conair name as well as the company’s other respected brands including Waring, Cuisinart, and BaByliss.
But with millions of customers worldwide—Conair sells its products on six continents—and a growing, geographically distributed staff, the company could no longer function optimally with its legacy telephony infrastructure.
A telephony environment in need of a makeover
Eric Zweigbaum, Director of IT and Global Communications, explains that the company’s telecom environment consisted of on-prem PBX systems at each location, and employee desk phones that offered very little functionality. Worse, because these systems didn’t give Conair’s IT team much administrative control, making even minor telephony changes took significant time. And with 3,000 global employees, this became a constant source of frustration for everyone.
“Adding, moving, and changing users in the phone system required us to involve the vendor,” Eric says. “In fact, it was such an undertaking that we had to set aside 20% of one IT employee’s time—the equivalent of a day every week—just to deal with those simple requests.”
A contact center solution that was falling short of expectations
Conair’s Customer Service teams—which are based in the UK and France—were also facing issues with the telephony solution supporting their contact center. In fact, each office had its own contact center system, and both were outdated and lacked functionality those teams needed to deliver the best possible customer experience.
Matt Jansen, Customer Service Manager for UK & France, explains: “Because our contact center systems were essentially standard phone systems—not cloud based—our agents and managers missed a lot of functionality. We couldn’t integrate our solution into Salesforce, for example, and our managers had very little visibility into call-volume trends or agent performance.”
Solving all these issues with RingCentral
Moving to RingCentral MVP allowed Conair to retire its outdated PBX systems and desk phones—and give its staff both the mobility to stay connected anywhere, and the convenience of easily reaching each other even across vast geographic distances.
“Now that we’re all in a shared cloud environment, we can reach our coworkers in other locations as easily as if we were dialing them internally,” explains Eric. “And whereas our old system offered zero remote capability—meaning employees were tied to their desks—now it’s easy for us to have business calls or meetings no matter what device we have, and no matter where we are.”
Eric also notes that by moving the company’s entire telephony environment to a centralized and intuitive cloud platform, Conair can now quickly and easily make system adjustments without having to wait for a third-party vendor.
“Adding new users, moving people between call groups, these requests often took days—and now they take minutes,” says Eric. “RingCentral is helping us improve our workflows across the company by letting us make those adjustments so quickly. And that IT employee who had to devote 20% of his time to coordinating phone changes with our vendor? He’s now using that free time to focus on more productive pursuits for our business.”
Improving the customer experience with RingCentral Contact Center
As Matt Jansen explains, his Customer Service department is enjoying similarly significant improvements after rolling out RingCentral Contact Center—thanks to both valuable new functionality and increased visibility into the department’s performance.
“Because we’re now managing our entire Customer Service department through a central, cloud-based phone system, we have more flexibility than ever in where we can have agents working. That means we can bring on agents to work remotely in time zones that let us extend our hours of operation—which is what we’re planning to do next. And that means providing better service to our customers around the world.”
As for greater visibility and business intelligence, Eric points to several features within RingCentral Contact Center that Conair never had with its previous call center solutions. “With RingCentral Contact Center, my department managers can now listen in on calls and even offer coaching to our agents.”
And with RingCentral’s reporting and analytics tools, Matt adds, “We have more visibility than ever into what’s happening in Customer Service—call-volume trends, agent performance, and whether we have the right level of resources for a given region or time of day. This is all going to help us make better business decisions.”
Originally published Nov 23, 2021
