Mowery & Schoenfeld
RingCentral helps this this top Chicago accounting firm scale its fast-growing staff efficiently
90+
employees of varying ages and comfort levels with new technology – all enjoying RingCentral
1
unified platform for calls, video and audio conferences, voicemail-to-email, and other valuable services
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 tech solution that doesn’t feel like a burden. This also helps free up my IT team, because we aren’t spending as much time dealing with phone issues.
Chris Madden
IT Manager
A top-10 Illinois accounting company
Founded in 1996 by members of large accounting firms looking for a new, more personal way to serve clients, Mowery & Schoenfeld, LLC built a unique business that placed employee and client satisfaction as its top priorities.
That approach has clearly worked, as the firm has grown at a rapid rate to become ranked as one of the 10 leading accounting companies in Illinois. Mowery & Schoenfeld has also earned numerous awards demonstrating the firm’s commitment to both its staff and clientele. Among the firm’s many industry honors, for example, are being named both a “Best Place to Work for Millennials” and a “Top Workplace for Boomers,” as well as a spot on Inc. Magazine’s list of “Fastest Growing Private Companies.”
A growing, younger staff wanted more modern communication tools
Mowery & Schoenfeld’s industry-leading reputation led to continuously growing slates of both clients and best-in-class job candidates. In recent years, the firm grew its staff by more than 33%, requiring larger office space. As part of this move, the IT team decided not to take its aging on-prem phone system along for the ride.
“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 that many of Mowery & Schoenfeld’s employees are younger and more comfortable with digital technology.
As Chris explains, “We polled our people about the features that would be most important in a new phone solution. 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.”
INDUSTRY
Accounting
HQ
Chicago, IL
YEAR FOUNDED
1996
EMPLOYEES
90+
The RingCentral implementation couldn’t have gone more smoothly
Chris points out that while it’s typical for IT implementations to cause at least a few hiccups, migrating Mowery & Schoenfeld to RingCentral was completely free of issues. And thanks to some help from RingCentral’s project management team, employees were able to begin using the platform, without any issues, immediately. “I’d describe the cutover to RingCentral as easy and painless,” Chris says.
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 RingCentral’s other services, like the audio and video conferencing. No one had any trouble getting set up on the system, and the migration itself was basically self-running.
Chris Madden
IT Manager
Switching to RingCentral proves even more beneficial than expected
As Chris explains, when Mowery & Schoenfeld decided to migrate to RingCentral, the firm was growing steadily but hadn’t yet reached its rapid-growth phase.
“We made the move primarily to give our staff more flexibility and mobility, and help them be productive from anywhere,” he says. “But now that we have expanded our team, we’re finding RingCentral helps us support the communication needs of our much larger staff much more easily than our old phone system did. It was a great decision to switch to RingCentral.”
“For one thing, we have a number of remote employees, even some who work internationally,” Chris 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.”
“Our employees are also getting a ton of use from RingCentral Video – 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.”
And as Mowery & Schoenfeld recently entered its most rapid-growth stage yet, bringing on employees more quickly than ever, Chris notes that RingCentral has proven invaluable at integrating those new employees into the company easily.
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.
Chris Madden
IT Manager