MMGY Global

This Travel-Industry Advertising Agency Found a Phone Solution That’s Taking the Company to New Places
Industry
Marketing and
Advertising
Hq
Kansas City, MO
Year founded
1981
Employees
400
Industry
Marketing and
Advertising
Hq
Kansas City, MO
Year founded
1981
Employees
400
RingCentral actually listened to us and helped solve our specific problem, like a real partner. In contrast to several vendors we talked to, I didn’t feel like RingCentral was trying to sell us.
Calep Howard
CIO, MMGY Global
100%
Calls viewed and analyzed
50%
 Increase in support team capacity
Goosehead Insurance (NASDAQ: GSHD) has leveraged a top-quality team and cutting-edge technology to become one of the largest and fastest-growing insurance brokerages in the industry. Today, more than 15 years after its founding, Goosehead is still in hyper growth mode.
But the company, which started with a mission to “put clients at the center of our universe,” found its on-premises phone system was holding it back from fulfilling that mission. The search for a better communications solution led to RingCentral.
A company on the rise… a phone system on the decline
But there was a problem: As MMGY Global was growing, building a reputation as the go-to marketing agency for the travel industry, the company’s phone system—or, more accurately, several systems—jeopardized both internal and external business communication.
As Chief Information Officer Calep Howard explains, the call quality and reliability of MMGY’s phone system continually degraded. “The audio on our calls was often unclear—that is, when the calls didn’t drop altogether,” he says. Even worse, this problem wasn’t confined to one-on-one phone calls; MMGY Global even suffered outages in the middle of important audio conferences with clients.
There were other problems, too. First, MMGY Global has added offices rapidly, some organically, others through acquisition. This led to a series of phone systems that weren’t integrated and didn’t communicate easily with each other. And that led to one of the most frustrating challenges for this fast-growing global organization.
For a highly collaborative, high-profile organization like MMGY Global, reliable phone service was a top priority—and the company’s IT team knew what it needed.
The cloud was a must… for several reasons
First and foremost, MMGY Global’s new phone solution had to be cloud-based. Calep has a simple explanation: “Hardware fails. It gets old. It needs repairing, replacing. I want someone else to own the infrastructure, to deal with the updates, the redundant telecom service, all of it.”
Another reason the company insisted on cloud was budgetary. MMGY is a growing business but manages its financial expenditures carefully. In the company’s experience—and in Calep’s own experience, running technology for both large and small business in the past—managing on-prem phone hardware is a lot more costly than outsourcing the infrastructure to a cloud provider.
After researching and speaking with several cloud communication providers, MMGY Global chose RingCentral. They based their decision on many factors: recommendations from other companies, positive industry reputation, competitive costs, and the feeling that they had found an IT partner.
The best sign I’ve seen that this is working is what I’m no longer hearing. I’m not hearing our dial-by-name directory is down. I’m not hearing we lost connectivity during a merger-and acquisition call. That’s what we wanted.
Calep Howard
CIO, MMGY Global
World-class communications for a world-class agency
When MMGY Global rolled out the RingCentral cloud-communications solution to its hundreds of employees, business communication began reflecting the agency’s industry-leading reputation.
The company’s calls and audio conferences now have excellent sound quality, and they don’t drop. Another benefit of the RingCentral solution is that for the first time, employees can use the app to take and make calls from their smartphones using their business numbers. This makes it easier for the team to be responsive to clients and coworkers wherever they are.
Also, employees can have these business conversations on the road or at home without worrying that they’re giving out their personal phone numbers. That’s opening up new opportunities for MMGY Global’s teams to collaborate with each other and with clients much more when they’re away from their office phones.
But perhaps the best evidence of how much more effectively MMGY Global’s employees are able to communicate and collaborate these days is what they aren’t saying. When IT isn’t part of a conversation, Calep notes, that means they’ve done their job properly and set the company up with the right tools to be successful.
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