Trojan Battery
RingCentral helps this leading battery maker supercharge its business communications.
By migrating to RingCentral, we found it easier than ever to connect with our coworkers in different locations, and with our customers, no matter where we were.
Eric Stermer
Senior IT Manager
Charging ahead in battery innovation for a century
When businesses describe themselves as “powering” an industry, they are usually speaking metaphorically. Trojan Battery provides the literal power sources enabling dozens of everyday applications that thousands of businesses and millions of people rely on for both work and play.
The inventor of the golf cart battery in 1952, Trojan Battery has become the world’s leading developer of a wide range of deep-cycle batteries—used to power everything from boats and RVs, to commercial trucks, to industrial-grade cleaning machines, to equipment used in the oil and gas industries.
And while solar and other forms of renewable energy have gained popularity in recent years, Trojan Battery has been a pioneer in this space as well—creating solar-powered and other types of clean-energy batteries for decades.
Trojan Battery’s record of innovation and market leadership has earned the company numerous industry awards—including a Frost & Sullivan “Innovative Enterprise” honor, the top position on Golf Course Industry Magazine’s list of “Most Admired Companies,” and Southern California Edison’s “Environmental Hero Award.”
Over the previous several years, Trojan Battery had been moving its IT environment to cloud-based solutions. However, one area that remained in-house and to which the company shifted its focus was its communications infrastructure.
INDUSTRY
Electrical
Manufacturing
HQ
Santa Fe Springs, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
1925
EMPLOYEES
1,937
A telephony infrastructure that was not keeping up with user needs
Eric Stermer, Trojan Battery’s Senior IT Manager, explains that a major catalyst pushing the company to cloud communications was the need for a better call center platform. “Our sales call center is in hurricane-prone Florida,” he says. “Because we depended on in-house hardware and the local carrier, whenever a hurricane took down that office, we lost the ability to take orders from customers all over the country.”
In addition to the constant threat of losing business due to a natural disaster, Stermer explains, Trojan Battery had other reasons to retire their aging phone infrastructure.
“We had been with our provider for about 10 years, and things mostly worked—aside from us not being able to easily reroute calls in the event of a hurricane. But from an IT standpoint, it took a lot to plan and oversee upgrades, negotiate contracts, research and buy equipment, and handle internal requests to make adjustments to the system. Everywhere we turned, we found more phone maintenance work.”
RingCentral helps give the company’s operations a boost
When they deployed RingCentral’s unified cloud solution, Stermer’s team resolved the company’s major operational concern: call center flexibility and uptime. And when a hurricane hit Florida just after the company migrated that office to RingCentral Contact Center, they experienced firsthand the wisdom of this move.
“With our old system, the hurricane would’ve had us scrambling to figure out how to redirect those inbound calls,” Stermer says. “But with RingCentral, we now had two great options. Our call center agents could just leave the office and take calls at home on their computers or mobile phones, or the call center manager could spend about one minute in the admin portal and route the calls to a team in our Indiana location.”
Stermer adds: “With RingCentral’s admin system, it’s so easy to make these adjustments that the call center team didn’t even need to involve IT.”
RingCentral is so intuitive, so easy to manage, we were able to migrate all of our 17 locations onto the new platform in a single day.
Eric Stermer
Senior IT Manager
Creating a better experience for employees and callers
By migrating to RingCentral, Trojan Battery’s staff also found it easier than ever to connect with coworkers in different locations, and customers, no matter where they were.
Eric explains: “Because our business numbers were tied to physical phones, stepping away from our desk or spending time in a different office location made it difficult to reach us. But now that we can use our business phone number on any device, we can stay accessible anywhere—in the office, visiting one of our manufacturing plants, traveling, or working at home.”
Enabling a broader labor pool than ever
Because many of the company’s employees can now work just as productively from anywhere using RingCentral’s unified cloud solutions—for phone, video and audio conferencing, team messaging, even online fax—Stermer notes that Trojan Battery is also discovering another operational advantage of having RingCentral.
“Because RingCentral has shown us that we can succeed as a remote company, our HR team is able to expand its search for talent. We can literally look for the best people for the job no matter where they are.”
With RingCentral, we’re always connected because we can receive and make business calls on any device, and people can reach us anywhere with one number. That has been a huge boost to our efficiency and productivity.
Eric Stermer
Senior IT Manager