Carvana
RingCentral Supports Car Retailer’s Fast Growth and Ensures that After-Delivery Questions Go to the Right Person
Industry
Retail
Hq
Tempe, AZ
Year founded
2012
Employees
1,300
Industry
Retail
Hq
Tempe, AZ
Year founded
2012
Employees
1,300
Our goal is to always implement solutions that help business efficiency and with RingCentral, we've done exactly that from the communications side.
Imran Kazi
Director of Technology Services, Carvana
100%
Calls viewed and analyzed
50%
Increase in support team capacity
By replacing the traditional dealership infrastructure with technology and exceptional customer service, Carvana offers consumers an easier way to buy a used car. Using the company’s website, customers can search through an inventory of 7,300+ cars, then finance, purchase, and trade in a car, 100% online. The Carvana approach also saves money. In 2016, customers who purchased a car through Carvana saved an average of $1,430 versus the Kelley Blue Book suggested retail value.
Customers take possession of their car in one of two ways. They can schedule home delivery of the vehicle. Or, if they prefer to pick up their car, they can opt in to Carvana’s “Fly and Drive” program wherein Carvana subsidizes $200 of the airfare to one of its car vending machines. These really are vending machines for cars and need to be seen to be believed. Vending machines are currently located in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, and San Antonio.
Imran Kazi is Carvana’s Director of Technology Services. Soon after joining the company, he noticed a gap in the company’s communications practices. The people who delivered cars to customers’ homes, which Carvana calls External Advocates, were using their personal cell phones to communicate with customers. After a delivery, if a customer had a question about how to register the vehicle or its navigation system, for example, he or she typically called the cell phone of the External Advocate, who wouldn’t necessarily know those answers. “We have internal teams set up to answer those types of questions,” explains Kazi. “I wanted to rework our communications to make sure those calls were directed to the right place.”
Scalability, mobility, and integrations made RingCentral the right choice
Kazi decided to move Carvana off its hardware-based PBX system and onto RingCentral because RingCentral’s support for mobility (with the RingCentral Phone) would solve the problem of External Advocates getting post-delivery calls to their personal cell phone numbers. In addition, the scalability of the RingCentral platform would support Carvana’s remarkable growth. In the 18 months that Kazi has been with the company, it has expanded from eight to 33 markets and total of 40 business locations across the US.
Kazi also selected RingCentral for its integrations with G Suite and Okta. RingCentral’s integration with Okta also enables Carvana to automate the provisioning of new RingCentral users directly from Carvana’s Okta directory, so that when a new employee is created in Okta, a new RingCentral user is automatically created. Then employees leverage Okta’s Single Sign-on to securely access RingCentral from any device.
We just get two redundant broadband circuits, then program the phone, ship it out to them, and within a day it’s up and running.
Imran Kazi
Director of Technology Services, Carvana
Happier advocates, better customer service, and support for rapid expansion
Kazi deployed RingCentral across the organization—in the Carvana headquarters, at regional locations and, of course, to the External Advocates, who are thrilled with this change. “This lets the External Advocates use the RingCentral softphones on their cell phones when communicating with customers,” explains Kazi. “Customers see the number for the Carvana office in their region.”
Carvana likes to promote close relationships with their customers. When customers have a question or a problem, they typically call their local office number. That call is answered by RingCentral interactive voice response (IVR) to get them directly to the person who can best solve their problem, regardless of where that person is: an agent in their centralized contact center, or an external advocate in the local office. For the customer, the experience is seamless regardless of who is the best person to handle their call. This echoes Carvana’s own business ethos. “Our goal is to always implement solutions that help business efficiency and with RingCentral, we've done exactly that from the communications side,” says Kazi.
RingCentral is also helping Carvana improve the customer experience through robust administrative controls and call analytics, which provide real-time visibility into call times and the number of customers on hold.
In terms of supporting Carvana’s growth, the fact the RingCentral is cloud based fits with Kazi’s overall strategy, which is “to have as small an on-premises footprint as possible and use SaaS solutions as much as possible to keep up with the pace we’re growing,” he notes.
RingCentral enables Kazi to set up a new office’s communications much more quickly than he could previously. “We just get two redundant broadband circuits, then program the phone, ship it out to them, and within a day it’s up and running,” he says.
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