Highlights:
- Improving service: With RingCentral’s easy-to-set-up phone menus and advanced routing, Ryder’s nearly 800 locations can easily connect customers to the right people.
- Enhancing mobility: Because they all now have the RingCentral mobile app, Ryder’s sales reps can receive business calls from anywhere—and close more deals.
- Saving money: By eliminating on-prem phone hardware, local lines, and telecom maintenance contracts, Ryder has substantially lowered its telephony costs.
- Empowering agents: RingCentral Contact Center helps Ryder Last Mile’s 180 agents better serve customers and the drivers who count on their help every day.
A “Leader” in third-party logistics, according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant
With nearly a century of experience in commercial trucking and transportation logistics, Ryder System has become an industry leader in meeting all aspects of businesses’ supply-chain needs—warehousing, distribution, truck leasing, third-party logistics, cross-border transportation, last-mile delivery, etc.
When a business needs its inventory stored, distributed, or delivered with care to a home or business, the chances are high they’ll choose Ryder System. The multiple-award-winning company serves more than 50,000 commercial customers—from small businesses to world-leading brands like Nissan, John Deere, Domino’s Pizza, and GM.
Looking for a way to improve customer service and reduce costs
Ryder has earned its strong reputation for outstanding service—Forbes has named it one of “The World’s Most Admired Companies,” for example—in large part because the organization is always looking for ways to improve the customer experience.
One opportunity the company found a few years ago, explains Senior Telecom Manager David Bartos, was to replace the aging, on-prem phone systems at Ryder’s nearly 800 branch locations with a unified cloud communications solution the company could easily operate from anywhere.
Those onsite PBX systems, David notes, created challenges to each location’s ability to deliver the best possible experience to customers. The most frustrating challenge was trying to configure these aging systems to provide easy routing for callers trying to reach a particular team at a branch site. As David explains, “Because our branches all used old, feature-poor phone systems, connecting callers with the right people on the first try was often difficult.”
With this modernization initiative, Ryder also saw another opportunity: to reduce its high telecom costs. And when they began deploying RingCentral, the company found they had solved both issues.
Delivering a better experience with RingCentral MVP
As his team rolled out the RingCentral cloud phone system across the company, David explains, Ryder’s various teams found several ways to use the solution to create better customer experiences—starting with the company’s hundreds of branch locations.
“With RingCentral, we were able to easily set up automated greetings and phone menus that directed a caller to the sales manager’s line or to the service team’s number. And those teams weren’t worrying anymore that their outdated, on-prem phone system would break down.”
The mobility and flexibility offered by RingCentral also helped another Ryder team—the sales division handling the company’s inventory of used commercial trucks—provide better service to their customers.
As David explains, “Because our Used Vehicle Sales reps now all have the RingCentral mobile app on their cell phones, they can make and receive calls on their business numbers when they’re away from the office—something they couldn’t do before. That makes it easier for them to serve customers and close more deals.”
Adding another customer-experience enhancement with RingCentral Contact Center
The company saw such significant operational improvements with its RingCentral MVP rollout that Ryder also deployed RingCentral Contact Center to power customer support for its newest business division, Ryder Last Mile.
That department’s team of 180 agents, David explains, has been able to stay responsive to customers and drivers—and deliver outstanding service—despite being 100% remote since the 2020 lockdowns began. “Those agents are all working remotely, and they’re handling 30,000 calls in an average month. But because they can join call queues and take calls so easily from their laptops, that team hasn’t missed a beat.”
As David also notes, Ryder Last Mile’s support agents are using a RingCentral integration into their Salesforce environment—which lets the agent see a caller’s profile and history before picking up. “That lets the agent have a more personalized and productive conversation from the start, rather than scrambling around looking for the customer’s details.”
Reducing their telecom expenses significantly
In addition to creating many operational efficiencies and helping the company improve its customer experience, David points out that the RingCentral migration has also led to the reduction in telecom costs that Ryder was hoping a cloud solution would deliver.
“Considering all the benefits we’re getting from RingCentral, it would be worth paying more for it than our legacy infrastructure. But we’re actually paying less. Moving to RingCentral cut our overhead way down. We don’t need an on-prem PBX at every location, or local phone lines, or maintenance to support the hardware. It’s all handled in the cloud.”
“Since we’ve been rolling out RingCentral across our locations, I can’t think of one ticket relating to a phone failure. And even if one does break, we can just ship it back and get it fixed or replaced. That’s saving us so much money—at minimum, the $400 it used to cost us to roll a truck out to the location for an IT pro to diagnose the problem.”
Originally published Aug 30, 2022, updated Feb 15, 2023