Sun Valley Floral Farms
One of the country’s largest flower growers sees staff productivity blossom with RingCentral
We have facilities in Northern and Southern California, and a lot of our team is now remote. But thankfully, we’re all connected through one communications environment and can easily collaborate with any coworker, anywhere, by phone, team message, or video. RingCentral makes it much easier to feel like we’re one team working toward one mission: sharing our beautiful flowers with everyone we can.
Kyle Sharp
IT Director
Sharing fresh-cut flowers—and joy—for more than 50 years
If you’ve ever received a beautiful arrangement of tulips, lilies, irises, or another colorful bulb flower—or if you’ve seen one of these eye-catching arrangements in a store—chances are you’ve encountered the work of Sun Valley Floral Farms.
One of the largest and most trusted growers of fresh-cut flowers in the United States, Sun Valley is a favorite partner of floral wholesalers and retailers throughout the country.
In addition to consistently delivering beautiful products year-round, Sun Valley has also earned its stellar reputation thanks to the company’s socially and environmentally responsible practices. Sun Valley became the first flower farm in the US, for example, to earn a certification from the highly respected Rainforest Alliance. And in 2021, Whole Foods—which buys Sun Valley’s tulips on a large scale—awarded the company with its new Sourced for Good seal.
A legacy phone system that was quickly wilting
For more than 15 years, Sun Valley communicated with customers and partners—as well as internally between office locations—using a legacy, on-prem phone system.
Kyle Sharp, Sun Valley’s IT Director, explains that this aging telephony infrastructure began presenting an increasing number of challenges to the company’s operations, and one enormous challenge when the lockdowns began.
“We had upgraded the PBX servers a few times over the years,” Kyle says. “But the desk phones were antiques that we were going to need to replace soon, which would’ve cost a fortune. Plus, even pre-COVID, we were thinking about business continuity, consolidating our communications platforms into one environment, and making it easier for our employees to stay connected outside the office. A cloud-based solution seemed like the obvious choice.”
An implementation so seamless, hardly anyone noticed
As Kyle explains, he felt vindicated in choosing RingCentral’s unified message, phone, and video solution as soon as his team began working with their dedicated RingCentral project management team to roll out the solution across the Sun Valley organization.
The implementation was so smooth, it was amazing. If you were an employee and we didn’t tell you it was happening, you wouldn’t have even noticed we were switching phone systems. No downtime. No employee complaints. No issues at all. And then, just like that, it was done, and everybody had this awesome new cloud phone system.
Kyle Sharp
IT Director
INDUSTRY
Farming
HQ
Arcata, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
1969
EMPLOYEES
450
A unified communications solution that creates efficiencies company-wide
As Kyle notes, RingCentral has helped Sun Valley improve operations across the organization, starting with enhancing a sense of team cohesion for the company’s remote employees.
“The fact that everyone now can have the RingCentral softphone on their computers, and the mobile app as well, is making it a lot easier for our work-from-home staff to feel connected to the rest of the company and to work more seamlessly throughout the day no matter where they are or what they’re doing.”
And, Kyle adds, Sun Valley’s employees are leveraging their RingCentral platform for more than just cloud-based phone calls.
“One of the best things about this solution is that we now have one platform for everything, including messaging, collaboration, and video meetings.
Our teams are going into the RingCentral messaging platform and creating ad hoc groups to manage a new project. And what’s great about that isn’t just that they can chat and share files in real-time, but also that the team has a historical record of everything related to the project and can find things easily.
Kyle Sharp
IT Director
Kyle also points out that another feature he found in RingCentral adds not only to his workflow efficiency but even his quality of life.
“My favorite feature is the Call Switch, which lets me change devices in mid-call. I’ll be in my office, talking on my desk phone, and realize I need to go do something—or I just want to step outside for some sun. I can transfer that call to the RingCentral mobile app on my cell phone, in real-time, and the other person doesn’t even know I’ve done it.”
A technology upgrade that’s saving the company money
Finally, Kyle notes, Sun Valley’s migration to RingCentral has also resulted in cost savings.
We had been paying several vendors for the solution we now have entirely through RingCentral. So this migration allowed us to consolidate those bills, including local third-party help to manage the on-prem systems in our different locations, and a separate video conferencing app.”Not having to buy hundreds of new desk phones to replace our ancient inventory is also going to result in some nice savings.
Kyle Sharp
IT Director
Kyle concludes: “We moved to RingCentral with different objectives in mind—all of which we’ve achieved—but we ended up lowering our telecom costs as well.”
From the implementation to onboarding our staff, to seeing all the ways we can use RingCentral’s tools to improve our mobility and productivity, this has been the best experience I’ve ever had with a cloud-based business solution.
Kyle Sharp
IT Director