Carroll Media
Global AdTech Firm Carroll Media Keeps its Four-Continent Team Connected with RingCentral
Thousands
IN MONTHLY SAVINGS BY NO LONGER PAYING CELL PHONE BILLS FOR EACH EMPLOYEE
1
GLOBAL COMMUNICATION PLATFORM CONNECTING EMPLOYEES IN 12 COUNTRIES
47%
REDUCTION IN UNWANTED TELEMARKETING CALLS SINCE SWITCHING TO RINGCENTRAL
The digital marketing business is all about flexibility, collaboration, teamwork, and always being accessible to clients. RingCentral helps us achieve every one of those objectives, every day.
DJ Carroll
CEO
For small businesses in non-technical service fields—real estate, insurance, landscaping, appliance repair, etc.—building a brand and marketing presence online can feel like an overwhelming task.
That’s why serial entrepreneur and business coach DJ Carroll founded Carroll Media—a global AdTech and social media marketing company that has helped hundreds of small businesses generate leads and customers using expertly developed social media ads and content.
Carroll Media has used its digital-marketing expertise and propriety software tools to deliver an average 237% increase in lead traffic for its clients. That proven track record of success—combined with the company’s unique month-to-month billing option—helps explain why Carroll Media has built a client roster of more than 300 small businesses across the United States and maintains one of the lowest client-churn rates in the industry.
Paying a small fortune for employees’ cell phone bills
In the early days of Carroll Media, Founder and CEO DJ Carroll kept his growing team connected by paying for everyone’s mobile phone bills. “That was costing us something like $100 per person per month,” he says. “And it covered phone service only; we were still going to need to pay for a video conferencing solution.”
Based on his vision for building Carroll Media’s staff, DJ could also foresee another long-term challenge with running the company’s communications on standard cell phone service.
“We were an international company from the beginning. I wanted a global talent pool for software engineers, social media experts, and creatives of all types—rather than limiting our search to people within driving distance of our Louisville headquarters. But if we tried to keep everyone connected by cell phone, those international calls would’ve cost us a fortune.”
INDUSTRY
AdTech and
digital marketing
HQ
Louisville, KY
YEAR FOUNDED
2016
EMPLOYEES
40
Cutting costs and improving workflows with RingCentral
Fortunately, DJ explains, he discovered RingCentral while he was acquiring another company. “Here was a platform that solved a lot of our communication challenges at once. RingCentral gave us much more flexibility, allowing us to make and receive calls and texts on our business numbers from anywhere—by using an app on our computers or personal cell phones.”
At the same time, DJ adds, the unified solution also helped the company consolidate its communication platforms and save money. “RingCentral also put everything—phone, SMS texting, and video conferencing—into a single app, so we didn’t need multiple tools and vendors to support our communications.”
Additionally, DJ explains, switching to the global RingCentral platform simplified the challenging issue of connecting Carroll Media coworkers in different countries.
“My Executive Assistant, Christine, lives in St. Lucia—but she and I chat by phone, video, and chat messages on the RingCentral platform every day, as if we were in the same building. And if I need her to book me a hotel or rental car for a trip to Cincinnati, for example, RingCentral makes it easy for Christine to call those local businesses from a US number.”
With everyone in the company now on the RingCentral system, and our internal calls not being charged at long-distance rates—even between coworkers in different countries—we’re saving thousands of dollars per month on our telecom costs.
DJ Carroll
CEO
Automating call-traffic flows saves the team time and frustration
When the company rolled out RingCentral’s Interactive Voice Response system, which helps callers navigate to the right person or department, Carroll Media discovered an unexpected—but extremely welcome—benefit.
Jarrod Ball, Account Executive for Carroll Media, says that “Using RingCentral’s Interactive Voice Response system, we were able to set up multi-tiered auto responses for inbound phone calls. While this is primarily useful for ensuring the caller reaches the right person, we’ve discovered that it has reduced the amount of spam calls we receive by a whopping 47%.”
Streamlining communication with RingCentral’s Click-to-Dial
Carroll Media’s staff is also improving efficiency and productivity with another RingCentral feature: Click-to-Dial.
“Our team calls a lot of people in a given day—prospects, clients, agency partners—and it’s great that they can have their headset plugged in and make an outbound call in one click from their computer’s browser.”
The team even uses RingCentral’s Click-to-Dial regularly for internal calls, DJ explains. “We’re all in our Trello project-management app throughout the day, and each Trello card has the phone number of the employee assigned to that task. Our team loves being able to just click to call that person if they have a question about the project.”
Helping international teams collaborate using RingCentral Video
Carroll Media’s creative team is truly international—with coworkers in India, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya, and the United Kingdom, among other places. If it weren’t for a global cloud-based communications solution like RingCentral, building a team this geographically distributed would be extremely difficult, and not at all cost-effective.
As Jarrod points out, “RingCentral allows us to hire without geographical boundaries, which is good, because our international team members are crucial to the success of our business.” He adds, “Although the time difference can be a challenge, we’re able to message and video chat with ease.”
Uncovering new business intelligence with RingCentral analytics
Finally, DJ points out, Carroll Media leverages RingCentral’s detailed reporting dashboard to monitor the team’s performance and improve the company’s operations.
“RingCentral’s analytics capabilities are so valuable. We use it to learn how many calls our account executives are making, how long they’re talking, the percentage of inbound calls we’re picking up, how many text messages we’re sending and receiving. You name, we can track it—and these data points are giving us great business intelligence that help us continually improve.”
We always had an office-based culture, but the pandemic forced us to go remote for a while. Then we brought everyone back, and now we’re experimenting with hybrid options. Thanks to RingCentral, we have a communications platform so flexible that it accommodates all these scenarios and lets us stay connected and productive wherever we are.
DJ Carroll
CEO