 |
Top Choice for Small Business and Professionals
“RingCentral has the features I need. Now my business number reaches me wherever I am. The service helps me look much more professional.”
- Ellis Eastham, owner of Eastham Electrical Services
“As a small business owner, I need more than just a phone number. With multiple extensions, call forwarding and fax, RingCentral combines all the features I need to manage my business communications."
- Adam Boulton, owner of The Ideal Warehouse
“Before RingCentral, my mobile number was my only communication line with my customers. Now, with a toll-free number and call forwarding service, my customers can easily reach me through a more professional line of communication."
- Ionut Copacel, owner of J&D Interiors
“RingCentral helps us look like a big company, even though we are four people working from different locations. My customers can now reach me when I am traveling as easily as when I am in the office."
- Simon Williams, owner of Simon Williams and Associates
Case Study #1: Eastham Electrical Services. Sparking new business with RingCentral.
Catching calls
The most important thing for any business is customers but for small, highly mobile companies, making sure they receive customers’ calls can be difficult.
Although Ellis Eastham has a home office, he is rarely there. Ellis and his two employees spend most of their time installing and servicing customers’ electrical fittings. This used to mean he would miss calls and lose business when his home number went unanswered or was picked up by one of his young children.
“Basically anyone who was in the house would answer the phone, and it didn’t sound very professional,” Ellis explains. “I wanted calls to reach me wherever I might be, so that I wouldn’t miss any customers.”
He needed a more business-like image and a service to match, and conducted a search on the Internet for 0800 services. “RingCentral was the offer that appealed to me most,” continues Ellis. Furthermore, it was able to provide him with the services he wanted without changing his telephone provider.
Freedom from hassle
Ellis quickly set up RingCentral Mobile. There was no hardware to buy, no installation costs, no engineers to co-ordinate and no long-term contracts. “The whole process has been smooth and straightforward,” he remarks.
RingCentral also has functions that Ellis is not yet using. These include things like phone extensions, advanced answering rules, music and messaging on hold, and Internet fax. “These features may become useful later on as the company grows,” he observes.
Concentrating on customers
Business is building with RingCentral. Eastham Electrical Services now has an 0800 number, which encourages more calls. Ellis notes, “The 0800 number appeals to customers because it’s free for them to get in contact with me. Plus it gives the company a better image.” Other RingCentral features allow Ellis to capitalise on this increased traffic. For example, when he’s out the business number is forwarded to his mobile phone so he is always available regardless of his location.
Ellis also plans to set up RingCentral extensions for his employees so that everyone can be reached via the same number. This will allow him to pass calls to colleagues when he’s busy, rather than asking customers to redial individual numbers, making Eastham Electrical Services look like a large company.
RingCentral allows Ellis to concentrate on his first priority: his customers. “RingCentral has the features I need. Now my business number reaches me wherever I am. The service helps me look much more professional,” he concludes.
Case Study #2: Ed Brill got the phone system he needed and found it delivered more than he expected.
ITS Magellan Services provides reservation and sales services to over 700 independent hotels in about 30 countries. They have five employees in the USA, one in Italy and three in South America.
They receive calls from hotels with software questions or consumers about booking questions. “We needed a way to separate the calls and get it to the right person,” says Ed Brill, ITS Magellan’s president. “Our phone line provider could not give us the services that we wanted—caller attendant, voicemail, email to fax and fax to email—without buying an enormously expensive phone system and we just didn’t want to do that. So I did some research, found RingCentral and we tried it.”
Ed set up separate extensions for each function: 1 for new reservations, 2 for hotel support, 3 for sales and so on. The calls go to whoever handles those tasks. New reservations go to Ft. Lauderdale; accounting, sales and business development go to New York. Ed found the set up and ongoing management of the system to be extremely easy. “For example,” Ed says, “if one of the staff in Florida is ill, on vacation or on a business trip, we can quickly direct all his calls and all his work over to somebody else during that time period.”
RingCentral’s Internet faxing proved immediately helpful in addressing their high volume of faxes. “Before, we had paper city,” he says. “You hoped nobody would light a cigarette for fear of fire, but the faxes now come as emails. We can receive faxes and forward them immediately to the local office that is responsible for that function. It has dramatically decreased the need to print everything and it has easily kept up with all the correspondence in a timely way and it’s done it in a way that’s easy to manage.”
RingCentral also proved to be a management tool. “RingCentral has given me management information that I never had before,” he says. “Being in New York with the operations center in Ft. Lauderdale, RingCentral helps me monitor the voicemails and faxes and communication that goes to a particular department and whether the messages are being handled. And it’s given me information so I don’t have to constantly request copies of something from our operations centre.”
“RingCentral is really a good solution for us because it gave us all the services, all the bells and whistles you would get from a big phone company and a big phone system but without the investment,” Ed says. “It’s working beautifully and we keep adding more services on every month. We’re not the largest account with RingCentral, but we are probably one of the most satisfied.”
“Overall,” he concludes, “RingCentral works exactly as it’s described. It has never failed. We are not using everything that’s there but what we are using is working really, really well.”
|
Case Studies
