How This Top Timeshare Broker Cut its Telecom Costs by 50% with RingCentral
If you decided to buy a timeshare, would you know where to start? There are a lot of brokers offering timeshare properties. How would you find the right firm to represent you? One responsible strategy would be to turn to the broker that is most trusted by the owners and operators of major brands, such as Disney Vacation Club and Wyndham. And that would be Fidelity Resales.
For 20 years, the highly trained real estate agents at Fidelity Resales have been successfully connecting buyers and sellers of timeshare properties in many of the most sought-after resort locations.
The firm has grown as a trusted name with such positive recognition that they have secured positions as the Preferred Broker for both Wyndham and Disney Vacation Club. In fact, since earning Disney’s preferred-broker designation in 2005, Fidelity Resales has sold more Disney timeshares than any other resale company.
But as increasing customer demand led to ever-growing call traffic, the firm’s legacy phone system reached its limitations.
A phone system out of support… a staff out of patience
Fidelity Resales’ migration to unified cloud communications actually took two steps. First, the firm replaced its old PBX with a newer IP phone system. “A lot of the PBX functionality wasn’t licensed anymore, and the provider wasn’t offering us any support,” recalls Ryan Pittman, the company’s Vice President of Marketing. “It was a real mess.”
But as it turned out, the newer phone system also lacked features, such as automated call logging and a CRM integration, that were critical to the firm’s operations. “We also wanted to give our staff more mobility,” Ryan says, “to allow them to respond to clients or connect with each other even when they weren’t in the office.”
The many advantages of cloud communications
When Ryan and his team rolled out RingCentral’s all-in-one cloud solution, the firm solved many of these operational challenges at the same time. They now had a solution that would log and record all calls—a must-have for protecting the firm and its clients, and to maintain compliance with the real estate industry’s regulations on securely maintaining client communications.
In addition, Fidelity used RingCentral’s IVR software to create the exact call-option menu they wanted. “We’re making it easier than ever for callers to navigate to the right people, based on whether they’re buying, selling, or if they’re already doing business with us and need customer support,” says Ryan. “And setting these menus up is easy too.”
And just as they’d hoped to do with their previous phone solution—but couldn’t—Fidelity Resales has integrated RingCentral into its Salesforce environment. This lets sales agents dial prospects and clients with a single click from within Salesforce. When clients call into Customer Service, agents can see key client details and history before they even answer the phone.
“The RingCentral-Salesforce integration also helps our sales managers monitor activity,” Ryan explains. “Before RingCentral, an ongoing challenge was how to know if an agent followed on a lead, when, and what the current status was. Now we have all of that data. Our sales managers can even get an alert if a lead isn’t called back within a certain timeframe.”
Leveraging built-in video conferencing for even more value
Yet another benefit Fidelity Resales is enjoying thanks to their new unified cloud communications solution is RingCentral’s integrated videoconference solution.
“We’ve found a number of internal uses for video calls,” says Ryan. “We use it for all types of employee training sessions—group training, one-on-ones, even companywide sessions. We also use it when we need to have more in-depth conversations with our developers.”
Texting with customers boosts response rate 61%
A surprise benefit of their new RingCentral solution was that employees could now send and receive SMS text messages, using their Fidelity business numbers, from any device. “Our agents use them every day,” says Ryan.
“When it comes being informed and updated on a property that we’re negotiating for them, or the status of a contract, clients really like this method of communicating with our agents. I know that because since we started using text messaging through RingCentral, we’ve seen a 61% boost in response rates.”
Cutting their communications bill in half
Even with all of these integrated communication services, and all of the added functionality the firm is now enjoying with RingCentral, this migration has still represented a 50% reduction in Fidelity’s telecom costs over its previous phone solution. “With RingCentral, we really have everything we could’ve asked for in a communications solution—including a provider that actually saves us money.”