Case Studies

Dessange - leading franchisor in hair salons 
Founded in 1954 with one salon in France, Dessange is now an international hair salon brand highly recognized in over 40 countries. The company recently acquired over a thousand Fantastic Sam franchises and hundreds of Camille Albane Salons. They have 10 regional offices in the United States and the corporate office is based out of Massachusetts.

Hassling with a complex, on-premise PBX 
Linda Halbruner, senior director of IT for Dessange International Inc., knew something had to change with her old on-premise phone system or PBX. She found herself wasting hours a week fiddling with the convoluted system or relying on an expensive technician to make simple tweaks such as changing the time, creating new extensions or forwarding calls when a receptionist went on vacation. Having to do this for 10 locations was even more time consuming. Furthermore, the PBX took up a lot of room in the IT closet and constantly required maintenance.

Opting for the flexibility of a cloud phone solution 
Linda decided that there had to be a better way. She did some research to see if a cloud phone solution would meet Dessange’s needs. She soon learned about RingCentral and the flexibility it provided administrators to easily set up and manage the entire phone system from a web portal or mobile app. It also empowered employees to manage their own phone preferences and call handling rules. Additionally, with RingCentral, Linda could optimize communication by tying together multiple offices within one phone system. 

Managing the phone system in minutes, not days 
Once Dessange switched to RingCentral, Linda immediately experienced the benefits. “Now when we add a new employee, I just takes me a few minutes to create a new extension and order a phone to be delivered overnight,” explained Linda. “And when employees need to move to a new desk, they can simply unplug their phone and plug it in to the Internet connection at their new desk. This would have been complicated and taken a lot of time using the old PBX,” she added. 

Empowering Employees on the Go 
Another benefit of RingCentral is the solution’s integration with mobile devices. “As I’m not always at my desk, I often forward my work calls to my RingCentral mobile app on my personal smartphone. If I’m at home and need to add a new employee to the system or give someone their password, I simply make these administrative changes from my iPad,” Linda highlighted. 

The RingCentral mobile app also gives Dessange’s employees added flexibility and agility. At least thirty percent of the company’s staff are mobile and travel from salon to salon giving educational trainings.“These employees now use the RingCentral mobile app with their business number on their personal mobile phones to stay in touch while in the field. “With the old PBX, it did not integrate mobile devices so these employees were forced to use their personal mobile phones to make work calls. They now appreciate being able to keep their work and personal mobile identities separate,” Linda emphasized. 

Integrating ten salons within one phone system 
RingCentral also enables Linda to tie all ten salons together within one phone system. This helps streamline communication as each salon has its own set of extensions and can easily dial each other and other locations. It also makes Linda’s job easier as she can manage the phone system for 10 locations from one single web portal or mobile app. “RingCentral allows everyone to be on the same system. Not only is it easier for them to communicate but I can easily administrate on the fly for any location from my iPad or the web portal,” said Linda. “It makes more sense than an on-premise PBX for someone that has to control different locations.” 

Adding value while reducing costs 
Along with the added functionality that RingCentral offers over an on-premise PBX, RingCentral offers Dessange significant cost savings by not requiring any capital expenditure and providing lower monthly operating expenses. “With RingCentral, we save nearly 30 percent vs. our prior system that equates to thousands of dollars every month.”