There is no doubt about it that today, companies are looking for ways to cut costs yet still increase revenue, keeping productivity and quality high. After 25 years in the business, Innovations International, a service company that provides consulting, seminars and surveys to organizations in the areas of leadership, diversity, empowerment, creativity and work life balance decided to close its physical doors and transform its business to a virtual office model with everyone working from their home offices.
Looking to keep true to its levels of customer and team communications as before, Innovations International implemented RingCentral’s cloud computing-based, hosted business phone service. With RingCentral (News - Alert), Innovations International was able to replace its traditional, premise-based expensive phone system, with a powerful and feature-rich hosted phone and fax service at a quarter of the cost and also eliminated the overhead cost of office rent.
“After 25 years in business, we felt it was time to make some changes to not only help reduce our overhead but to accommodate our employee’s needs and help reduce their commute times,” said Danny Guillory, CEO, Innovations International. “However, with a team of five full time staff and 30 contractors, we needed the right tools and technology to make the distributed working model successful.”
Guillory decided on RingCentral’s products for a professional phone service with multiple extensions, directory, call forwarding and more all hosted online. With RingCentral, each employee has an extension that can connect to a home office or mobile phone, ensuring they can be reached regardless of where they are.
“With all our staff working from their home offices in San Francisco and Salt Lake City, our old premise-based phone system could never have met our business needs, coupled with the fact that it was extremely costly to deploy and maintain,” added Guillory.
In addition, they also use Internet fax to manage all their contracts. RingCentral allows them to easily add another extension to the main number in case they need to bring a contractor on board for a particular project. The contractor appears as a permanent member of the team.
“RingCentral is incredibly easy to setup and charges zero startup fees, while making use of all our existing phone lines. This allows us to significantly minimize our overhead,” continued Guillory.
Key features of RingCentral include:
- An auto-receptionist that professionally answers, greets and directs callers to the right person
- Answering rules that are configured to automatically route calls to the right person at their home office or mobile phones, based on time of day, date and the continuously changing availability of each team member
- Multiple mailboxes for voicemail ensure that everyone has secure access to all their voicemail via email, phone or computer
- Call logs that register all inbound calls, enabling the firm to track the time spent with each client
- Internet fax capabilities that convert incoming faxes to PDFs, and makes them immediately available to distributed team members to view, forward and file them electronically
The International Telework Association and Council estimate that by 2010, the number of U.S. employees teleworking will increase from the current 26 million to 100 million.
“We eliminated the physical office now for 9 months and have been pleased with how well the business has been operating,” stated Guillory. “All business owners understand the importance of being easily accessible to customers and staff. An important part of being accessible is having a powerful phone system that you can trust.”
To learn more, be sure to visit RingCentral’s Fax Channel!
Jessica Kostek is a channel editor for TMCnet, covering VoIP, CRM, call center and wireless technologies. To read more of Jessica’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jessica Kostek