Beauty Solutions

Beauty Solutions Improves Its Internal Processes, Team Productivity, and Customer Service with RingCentral
Beauty Solutions logo
We were looking for a better cloud phone service, but we got a lot more with RingCentral.

Shane Brown

IT Marketing Coordinator, Beauty Solutions
Beauty Solutions is a wholesale distributor of high-end beauty products for licensed salons and stylists in California, Nevada, and Arizona. And although the company’s primary business is its upscale product line, Beauty Solutions prides itself as much on the educational services the company provides its clients as on the products it sells to them. In fact, each year since its founding, the company has increased its investment in the classes and other educational services it offers to salon owners and licensed stylists to help them become more successful in their own businesses.
The combination of its outstanding portfolio of upscale products and expert training for beauty industry professionals has helped Beauty Solutions grow to a 100-employee business serving salon owners across three states and selling out thousands of educational events each year. But that growth requires a robust and reliable communications solution—which led Beauty Solutions to RingCentral.

A Google search for a better cloud phone solution leads to RingCentral

“We moved from an analog phone system to a VoIP service a couple of years ago, but that solution had some issues,” says Shane Brown, IT Marketing Coordinator for Beauty Solutions. “The big drawback was business texting. That’s really important for our staff’s productivity, and our vendor’s text functionality wasn’t very good. We also had problems with the phone service itself. So we decided to find a better solution.”
“I did a Google search and found a few cloud phone services, including RingCentral,” Brown recalls. “I read up on the companies, compared features, and did free trials with the most promising. “Our trial experience with RingCentral was by far the most impressive. Everything ran seamlessly. Our rep was responsive and helpful. And the platform itself—particularly the business texting—was easily the best.”
INDUSTRY
Retail
HQ
Santa Cruz, California
YEAR FOUNDED
2008
EMPLOYEES
100

Real-time communication helps the bottom line

For the free trial, Brown limited the company’s use of RingCentral to a single department: the telemarketing group. After the solution proved itself during the trial period, Brown began quickly rolling out RingCentral MVP™ company-wide, and each department that discovered what the platform could do enthusiastically adopted it.
“Now everyone uses RingCentral MVP all the time,” Brown explains. “We have lots of uses for the platform across the company, and they’re benefiting us in a number of ways.” For example, “The employees at our brick-and-mortar stores are fully trained on our products, so if we need them to help out with our customer service call center, they can just log in to the system from their store and take service calls as needed. That’s a great benefit for us and our customers.”
“Our warehouse also uses the RingCentral business texting feature or the team chat app to communicate with our sales reps in real time—for example, if they have a question about an order they need to package for shipping. That’s been great as well.”
“Our sales reps use the texting feature to stay in constant communication with their team leaders, which is probably where the messaging functionality has been the most beneficial to our company. That real-time communication is helping our reps become more successful, which is helping our bottom line.”
“We also created a RingCentral team called ‘Education Questions’ and added all of our education experts. When our sales reps are meeting with a salon owner or stylist and they have a question, they can post it in real time to this team chat, and someone will answer quickly. That’s so important because it means our rep doesn’t have to break the momentum of the conversation with that client by calling in to our office.”

Analytics reports lead to process improvements

“We found additional benefits in RingCentral’s analytics: we can always see how we’re performing, and that helps us discover issues and opportunities we probably would have missed.”
“For example, looking at our RingCentral Live Reports, we realized that between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. our customer service lines get really busy. Knowing that has helped supervisors to adjust our team’s schedules so we’re always properly staffed, and the teams know not to take lunch breaks during that window. Furthermore, if we need to, we can ask our store employees to log in to the customer service call queue and take calls.”
“We also realized that a bunch of people were mistakenly calling a local Beauty Solution store rather than our sales or support numbers,” Brown continues. “They were Googling ‘Beauty Solutions,’ and the local store’s number popped up. So, our store employees had to take calls meant for our support or sales teams. Because we saw that trend in the reporting, we quickly set up a menu to catch those customers and route them to the right number. And our store employees have said they’re no longer dealing with those mistaken calls.”
“Making this fix also allowed us to improve the experience for those customers calling in. And because those mistaken calls were probably costing us some sales, it likely also helped us to make more money.”

RingCentral implementation reveals another surprising benefit

As they rolled out RingCentral, the Beauty Solutions team was thrilled to learn they could embed pictures right in their texts with RingCentral’s multimedia messaging service (MMS) capability.
“Thanks to RingCentral’s MMS capability, we were able for the first time to text each other photos, which is a huge benefit for us,” Brown explains.
“Our sales reps are often asking or answering questions about hair color, and the ability to quickly text a photo to a customer or a colleague is really valuable. When we realized RingCentral gave us this MMS capability, that was like an unexpected gift. Our previous VoIP service didn’t have MMS.”
We found additional benefits in RingCentral’s analytics: we can always see how we’re performing, and that helps us discover issues and opportunities we probably would have missed.

Shane Brown

IT Marketing Coordinator, Beauty Solutions

The platform promises to play a key role in the company’s sales plans

Next up for the Beauty Solutions–RingCentral rollout will be the sales team. “Just having a phone number that will always stay consistent for all the customers in a given territory, and not having to change it whenever a sales rep leaves and someone replaces them, will be a big benefit for us,” Brown explains.
“We’re also excited about bringing sales onto the RingCentral platform because it will help us monitor sales voicemails,” Brown adds. “We know our reps are busy and can’t always check new voicemails right away, but with RingCentral we’ll be able to check those messages and alert the rep if one contains an important customer request, or even let them transfer a voicemail straight to customer service, so someone can fulfill the order. That’s going to be great for our business.”

RingCentral helps to create better customer experiences

“We were looking for a better cloud phone service, but we got a lot more with RingCentral,” says Brown. “This platform is helping improve our productivity, creating a better sense of connectedness among all of our employees (especially our remote store staff), and allowing us to create better experiences for our customers.”