RingCentral Helps This Top Chicago Accounting Firm Scale Its Fast-Growing Staff More Effectively Than Ever
Mowery & Schoenfeld takes culture seriously! The Firm has earned a number of top workplace awards, many year after year—including “Best Place to Work” by both Crain’s Chicago Business and Accounting Today, “Top 300 Firms” by Inside Public Accounting, “Healthiest Companies in America” by Interactive Health, and one of Inc’s “Fastest Growing Private Companies.” Perhaps most impressive of all, the Firm was named both a “Best Place to Work for Millennials” and a “Top Workplace for Boomers.”
That kind of positive reputation earned the Firm a continuously growing slate of clients as well as a best-in-class slate of job candidates. In calendar year 2019, Mowery & Schoenfeld grew its staff by 33%, from 64 employees to more than 85. To accommodate this growth, the Firm moved to a larger office space in 2019. As part of this move, the IT team decided not to take its aging on-premises phone system along for the ride.
A growing, younger staff wanted more modern communication tools
“We had been talking about switching to a more modern phone system for a while, but we didn’t feel ready,” recalls Chris Madden, Mowery & Schoenfeld’s IT Manager. “Moving our headquarters gave us the perfect opportunity to find something new and better. We were hesitant to take our legacy phone system to the new office—that thing was 20 years old and could give out anytime.”
One reason the Firm knew a cloud phone system would be beneficial was many of Mowery & Schoenfeld’s employees are younger and comfortable with digital technology. “We polled our people about the features that would be most important to them in a new phone solution,” says Madden. “They didn’t want better desk phones or color screens. They wanted softphones, the ability to take and make calls anywhere using an app on their computers or cell phones. And they wanted features to make them more productive, like voicemail transcriptions. These are busy people, and reading or skimming a voicemail is a lot faster than listening to it.”
The implementation couldn’t have gone more smoothly
“The cutover to RingCentral was easy and painless,” Madden explains.
“We had someone from RingCentral come out to our offices on go-live day to help with any implementation issues. He was terrific. We held a few training sessions to show our staff how to use the new phone system, including the apps and the other communication services that come with RingCentral, like the audio and video conferencing. There weren’t any major issues. No one had any trouble getting set up on the system, and the migration itself was basically self-running.”
The move to RingCentral is paying even bigger dividends than expected
“When we decided to switch over to RingCentral, the company hadn’t yet entered into this period of rapid staff growth,” Madden says. “We made the move primarily to give our staff more flexibility and mobility, and help them be productive from anywhere.”
“But now that we have expanded our team, we are finding RingCentral helps us support the communications needs of even our larger staff much more easily than our old phone system. It was a great decision to switch to RingCentral.”
“For one thing, we have a number of remote employees, even some who work internationally,” Madden says. “Having a cloud phone system that lets them be accessible from anywhere, without needing a desk phone, is really helping those employees be productive and connected.”
“Additionally, because RingCentral is so intuitive and user-friendly, all of our employees—even those who aren’t as comfortable with technology—are finding it easy to use. They really appreciate a new technology solution that doesn’t feel like an additional burden. This also helps free up my IT team, because we aren’t spending as much time dealing with phone issues.”
“Our employees are also getting a ton of use from RingCentral Meetings—for internal meetings, for video-based training, and for client meetings. Having the video service built right into the RingCentral app makes it so easy.”
“RingCentral is even making it easier to onboard employees. This is an important factor as we continue to grow at a rapid pace. All we need to do now is send our new hires a couple of short RingCentral training videos. It’s rare anyone has any questions or needs additional help with this intuitive solution.”