PMU
Thanks to RingCentral, the organizer of horse racing, sports and poker betting is building customer loyalty across all digital channels.
Detroit Pistons
Detroit Pistons score big with RingCentral's AI-powered communication solutions
Region
Americas
Company size
100–399
Industry
Sports & Entertainment
Products used
Key integrations
We look at RingCentral as not only a communications vendor for our business, but a trusted AI business partner to help solve our communication needs.
Paul Rapier
Vice President of IT, Detroit Pistons
A great comeback story
The history of the Detroit Pistons reads like one of the most inspiring comeback stories in all of professional sports. After moving from their original Indiana home to Detroit, Michigan, the team spent the next 41 seasons without an NBA championship. Only one other pro team in any sports league—baseball’s St. Louis Browns—had ever gone longer without a championship.
But then, in the decade and a half between 1989 and 2004, the Detroit Pistons won three championships. In fact, from the 1988 through 2005 seasons, the team made it to the NBA Finals five times. Only two teams—the LA Lakers and the Chicago Bulls—made more Finals appearances during that period.
When the Pistons moved from their long-standing home at The Palace of Auburn Hills to brand new Little Caesars Arena in 2017, the team made history again. With the Pistons move to downtown, Detroit became the only US city to have its professional baseball, football, basketball, and hockey teams all playing in its downtown district.
The Pistons followed up their move to the new stadium by constructing a nearby training facility and headquarters, which opened in 2019. Although setting up its corporate offices in the new, high-tech downtown facility promised to improve the Pistons’ operations, the move itself created a serious IT challenge.
20%
work saved daily, as post-call transcriptions are auto-integrated into Salesforce
30%
time savings are achieved with RingCentral AI, improving issue resolution & service quality
50%
of calls are expected to be resolved by AI Receptionist, cutting answer times to seconds
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A communications infrastructure in need of a new game plan
Like most long-running organizations in any industry, the Detroit Pistons had built up their IT communications infrastructure organically, over time, adding new services and vendors when necessary. But after 30 years in the same location, the team’s corporate employees—in sales, support, marketing, HR, finance, etc.—found themselves trying to make do with a wide range of communications tools, many of which were inflexible and incompatible with each other.
The organization’s move to their newly-built training facility and corporate offices at the Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center served as the perfect opportunity for the IT team to reimagine the organization’s entire communications environment.
“Previously, managing our on-premises phone system was a challenge at times,” says Paul Rapier, the Pistons’ Vice President of Information Technology. “It took up time for maintenance and troubleshooting.”
“Previously, managing our on-premises phone system was a challenge at times,” says Paul Rapier, the Pistons’ Vice President of Information Technology. “It took up time for maintenance and troubleshooting.”
Rather than trying to rebuild their legacy communications environment in the new offices, Paul decided that his team would find a more modern, cloud-based system that could work anywhere. “If we found the right solution,” he adds, “we would also be able to consolidate our other systems and vendors… for things like audio conferencing, faxing, video calls into one environment.”
Some of the challenges were boiled into two main categories. One was moving locations and having it easy to get everyone onboarded and working immediately. The second was to eliminate a multi-tenant on-prem system that’s costly to maintain.
Paul Rapier
,
Vice President of IT
RingCentral proves the ideal teammate
After thoroughly researching the industry —“We seriously vetted about 8 providers,” Paul says—the IT team selected RingCentral. There were several reasons this solution proved to be the all-star.
“The reason the Detroit Pistons chose RingCentral was because they provided an all-in-one solution that could grow with us.” explains Paul. “With RingCentral, the products we are using is RingEX for business communications, RingCX for our customer experience contact center, RingCentral Events for our virtual and live engagement meetings internally, RingCentral open platform - which are integrations with Salesforce and also using business SMS.”
Advanced Support ensures seamless transition
Romello Morris, the Pistons’ Senior Help Desk Technician, highlighted the smooth onboarding and facility move with RingCentral, stating, "Getting started and moving facilities using RingCentral is really smooth. We went live immediately in our new facility because RingCentral exceeded our expectations with Advanced Support. They were available 24/7 during our migration and worked through any hiccups we might have had." He emphasized RingCentral's expertise in customizing their phone system: "The main benefit was having the expertise to customize our phone system. RingCentral filled any gaps that we may have had in our previous configuration and we leaned on them to configure IVR." Romello also points out the crucial benefit of empowering Customer Experience Agents, noting that upon RingCentral implementation, "an important feature for us was to let our Customer Experience Agents be independent and have the ability to manage the task of adding or removing agents."
Paul also shares how the RingCentral app has transformed operations for their ticketing team, stating, "The RingCentral app has been a game-changer for our staff at Little Caesars Arena. It's given our ticketing team the mobility they need, allowing them to stay connected and responsive no matter where they are in the venue. This flexibility has significantly improved our ability to serve fans efficiently."
The value we’re seeing with RingEX is tremendous, we save at least 20% of work daily with post call transcription and having these transcriptions go directly into Salesforce.
Paul Rapier
,
Vice President of IT
Transforming the Pistons’ customer experience with AI Receptionist and RingSense
The implementation of RingCentral's AI-powered solutions has significantly enhanced the Detroit Pistons' customer experience and operational efficiency. Paul highlights the impact: "By using AI in our customer experience platform, we anticipate our agents will save 30% of their time."
Beyond operational efficiency, understanding customer sentiment plays a pivotal role in delivering exceptional experiences, and RingSense has been a valuable tool in achieving this. "With RingSense, the sentiment analysis captured has been invaluable," Paul explains.
Not only by saving us a day's worth of work by surfacing insights we would not be able to capture automatically, but by highlighting the gaps our team may miss from customers, like emotions.
Paul Rapier
,
Vice President of IT
Romello shares his excitement about new AI products: "With RingCentral, we are excited to use new AI products like AI Receptionist, which we anticipate will save our agents and resolve ideally 50% of inbound calls along with reducing answer times from minutes to seconds." He adds, "And with RingSense, we anticipate it will save us 20% of our time weekly by building a knowledge base within our contact center product."
Summing up their experience, Romello concludes, "RingCentral AI is completely changing the way we work."
We look at RingCentral as not only a communications vendor for our business, but a trusted AI business partner to help solve our communication needs.
Paul Rapier
,
Vice President of IT
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