H&CO
Integrating RingCentral with Microsoft Teams, HubSpot, and other apps is helping this leading cpa firm accelerate its global expansion
We’re in a rapid expansion phase, acquiring businesses and adding new services all over the world. Being able to bring new teams into our global telephony environment—without having to travel to those offices—helps us make new business units productive more quickly. RingCentral is definitely contributing to H&CO’s global growth.
Julian Gil Barrientos
IT Consultant
One of the top public accounting firms in the United States
For decades, businesses around the world have turned to the experts at H&CO for help with accounting, taxation, and other corporate advisory services. The company’s multilingual professionals have built a strong reputation as experts in complex international business issues—such as the tax reporting requirements unique to multinational firms, and best practices for setting up a subsidiary in a new country.
Global demand for H&CO’s accounting and advisory services has grown so much, in fact, that today the organization serves more than 15,000 clients in 30 countries. The industry’s leading publication, INSIDE Public Accounting, has also named the Florida-based H&CO to its “Top 200 List” of the largest public accounting firms in the United States.
International offices, hundreds of employees, and one cloud phone solution
In recent years, H&CO has been on a rapid pace of international expansion, acquiring several businesses throughout Latin America and staffing up to offer new services to these regions, including SaaS-based accounting solutions. Julian Gil Barrientos, IT Consultant for H&CO, explains that this international growth created the need for a global business phone solution.
“We were setting up offices in Chile, Columbia, Argentina, Mexico, Costa Rica, and several locations in Brazil. We didn’t want to have one telecom provider in Central America, another in South America, and a third in the US. That would’ve created problems connecting coworkers in different countries. It also would’ve made it more difficult for our clients to reach the right people. And it would’ve cost more.”
As Julian explains, H&CO’s IT team implemented Global RingEX, a centralized cloud communications solution that can create one shared telephony environment for a business with locations all over the world.
Global RingEX is ideal for a global firm like ours for several reasons. We can easily set up business numbers for any country, which gives our clients comfort because those calls appear local. We can also set a default language for each country. And because we have one centralized environment for all offices worldwide, we can easily transfer calls internationally using internal extensions.
Julian Gil Barrientos
IT Consultant
INDUSTRY
Accounting and
advisory services
HQ
Coral Gables, FL
YEAR FOUNDED
1992
EMPLOYEES
500+
More recently, another major event forced H&CO to adjust its global telephony operations. This time, Julian explains, the company again found that RingCentral had the solution H&CO needed.
H&CO finds the ideal RingCentral integration for the lockdowns
The 2020 lockdowns sent nearly all of H&CO’s global staff home. Julian, who oversees the company’s global cloud initiatives, points out that H&CO uses Microsoft 365 for most of its daily workflows. “Because we were already using Microsoft apps all day, Microsoft Teams seemed like the logical place for our internal messaging and file sharing while everyone was at home.”
But that strategy created a challenge: Teams didn’t provide H&CO with the global telephony capabilities the company needed. Julian knew H&CO’s employees would find it inefficient and frustrating to be working in two separate communication apps throughout the day—Teams for internal chats, and RingCentral for their business calls.
Julian’s team found the perfect solution to this challenge, he says, with RingCentral Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams.
The Direct Routing integration allowed us to place and receive business calls through RingCentral right in our Teams environment, using the native Teams dialer. When RingCentral’s Professional Services team set that up for us, we were able to give all our employees worldwide a single cloud communication platform for everything, including telephony.
Julian Gil Barrientos
IT Consultant
Creating efficiencies with additional RingCentral integrations
With RingCentral powering H&CO’s global telephony operations, Julian and his team began looking for more ways to leverage the platform to improve company workflows. They found a big opportunity when they discovered the RingCentral for HubSpot integration in the RingCentral app gallery.
“We use HubSpot as our global CRM, and the RingCentral integration gave us so many workflow improvements,” he says. “First, our account managers, client relations managers, and other teams now have a RingCentral phone widget in their HubSpot environment, so they can dial out without having to leave the app. Also, RingCentral automatically creates a log of each call and syncs it in HubSpot, so the rep doesn’t have to manually enter that data each time.”
We discovered the RingCentral for Okta integration in the RingCentral app gallery, and we’ve deployed it across the company for single sign-on. It’s just one of several RingCentral integrations that are helping us remove extra steps and hassles in our employees’ daily workflows, which we estimate saves them at least a couple of hours each day.
Julian Gil Barrientos
IT Consultant
Lowering their telephony costs substantially
As Julian also points out, H&CO’s companywide move to RingCentral is also saving the company thousands of dollars monthly on telecom-related costs.
“Moving to Global RingEX allowed us to consolidate several communication services. Also, as we hire new people around the world—which we’re doing a lot these days—we no longer need to buy them desk phones. And because we now have one partner for worldwide telephony, we don’t have to sign up for costly business phone service with local or regional carriers anymore.”
Based on all the cost-saving benefits of moving to RingCentral… including consolidating our telephony relationships to a single partner and eliminating the need for phone hardware… I’d estimate RingCentral is saving H&CO $2,000 to $3,000 each month. That’s just one more reason we’re thrilled that we made this move.
Julian Gil Barrientos
IT Consultant