We have regular meetings with leadership to review the performance of our phone and contact center systems, and those meetings used to be tense. But now that we have RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center, our executives are thrilled as they pull up our reporting dashboard and see how much our answer times, abandon rates, and other key metrics have improved.
Christopher Ciolino
Communications Engineer
The managed print services company trusted by 29,000 businesses
In the field of managed print services, Flex Technology Group is the only full-service provider backed by a national network of support locations and expert technicians trained to support all major print vendors’ solutions.
FlexTG has demonstrated such expertise and reliability, in fact, that today the company counts nearly 30,000 organizations as customers—including many Fortune 500 corporations.
Consolidating phone systems for 14 different lines of business
FlexTG has grown to become one of the most successful and sought-after print service businesses in the US. The company achieved much of its growth organically. But in recent years, FlexTG sped up its national expansion by acquiring smaller businesses across the country. And as Communications Engineer Christopher Ciolino explains, those acquisitions led to IT communication challenges.
FlexTG worked with their technology partner, Softchoice to identify RingCentral as a solution to address our needs.
“All of the companies we brought into FlexTG had their own setups for phone and contact center service—different vendors, different physical configurations, different carriers. Before we moved everyone to RingCentral, we had separate phone environments for 14 lines of business. That made it difficult to do even the smallest things, like transferring a call from one location to another or just finding the phone number of an employee at one of our new subsidiaries.”
As he dug into the details of FlexTG’s decentralized communication systems, Christopher found another problem: Many of their newly acquired businesses were overpaying for telecom. Some needlessly paid separately for phone and contact center solutions. Others were paying carriers for services they weren’t using, including one business unit still paying for a PBX and phone lines they hadn’t used in a decade.
But the biggest red flag Christopher identified was a new subsidiary paying for a costly phone system nobody even used.
With RingEX, our internal communications are so much more efficient. We’re all in the RingCentral system, so looking up an employee in any part of the company is quick and easy. We can also easily transfer calls to anyone using their RingCentral extension. And for the first time, we have analytics for all of our calls, so we’re able to identify trends across the company and improve the caller experience.
Christopher Ciolino
Communications Engineer
Unifying business units, teams, and workflows with RingCentral
Christopher had two primary reasons for migrating the entire FlexTG organization onto RingCentral.
First, bringing all 1,300 of our employees into a shared cloud communications environment would create efficiencies and make everyone more connected and accessible. That, he explains, is why he found RingEX to be an ideal solution.
“With RingEX, our internal communications are so much more efficient. We’re all in the RingCentral system, so looking up an employee in any part of the company is quick and easy. We can also easily transfer calls to any team or individual using their RingCentral extension. And for the first time, we have reporting and analytics for all our calls, so we’re able to identify patterns across the company and improve our callers’ experience.”
Another major workflow improvement, Christopher adds, has been the ability for customer-facing teams to stay accessible from anywhere using the RingEX app on their smartphones.
Our sales reps used to give out their personal cell numbers so that prospects and customers could reach them anywhere. But they didn’t like having to share those numbers. Thanks to the RingEX mobile app, they can give out only their work number, still be reachable outside the office, and always know if an incoming call is personal or business.
Christopher Ciolino
Communications Engineer
Making big customer service improvements with RingCentral Contact Center
The second key reason he chose RingCentral, Christopher explains, was the ability to deploy both a world-class unified communications system (RingEX) and call center solution (RingCentral Contact Center) from the same provider.
“I was impressed with the capabilities of RingCentral Contact Center, and almost immediately after implementing it for our customer support teams, we saw the results we were hoping for.”
The ability to identify patterns in call traffic and agent performance using RingCentral Contact Center’s reporting dashboard, Christopher adds, and then easily adjust call queues or routing instructions based on those learnings, led to significant workflow improvements right away.
Just a few weeks after we moved our customer support operation onto RingCentral Contact Center, the data we analyzed shocked us. Our average call wait times dropped by about 97%, and our abandoned-call rate was down by 91%.
Christopher Ciolino
Communications Engineer
An ingenious workflow connecting RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center
To create yet another significant time-savings for the customer support team, Christopher devised a creative workflow to leverage the capabilities of both RingCentral Contact Center and RingEX.
“Our agents used to start their shifts listening to voicemails on the customer support line. If they had 30 messages, each lasting a minute, that meant our agents spent a half-hour each shift listening to voicemails—and not taking calls. Because RingEX has voice-to-transcription, I can send our RingCentral Contact Center voicemails into RingEX, which transcribes them, then sends them back to RingCentral Contact Center as an email. So, our agents now spend just a minute or two reviewing email transcriptions instead of listening to them all.”
Now that our customer support agents can read transcripts of their voicemails and don’t need to hear the entire messages, those teams are saving about 20% of their time just from that one workflow improvement. That’s time our support agents can now spend taking care of our customers more quickly when they call in.
Christopher Ciolino
Communications Engineer
