Ray White, Australasia’s largest real estate group, has adopted RingCentral MVP and RingCentral Contact Centre as part of its cloud migration strategy to move all of its legacy infrastructure and applications into the cloud.
Ray White established a cloud-focused strategy in 2015, first rolling out a cloud-based technology platform to support its 1,000 offices, including Google G Suite (now Google Workspace).
“Moving to RingCentral’s fully cloud-native Contact Centre solution has helped in de-risking the business and supported our ambitions of moving out of our data centre. Deploying RingCentral has put our telephony destiny in our own hands,” explained Ray White’s Head of IT Operations Ben Cowie.
Deploying RingCentral has also opened a range of innovations, opportunities for future expansion and deployment of additional communications functionality across the national and international Ray White Group. Ray White runs primarily on a franchise model, with the Ray White Group providing overall management and support for the individual franchise owners, as well as providing other group services. Those services include Ray White Concierge, an 80-agent contact centre that can “take care of everything” for home buyers, renters, investors and sellers. Concierge, which helps more than 5,000 people a month in Australia and New Zealand move into their new home, makes over 50,000 calls per month and delivers almost 40,000 real estate opportunities to agents each year.
RingCentral Contact Centre had an immediate impact when it was implemented. The biggest benefit for Concierge is greater visibility – particularly in the areas of disposition and timecard reporting, call volume analytics, contact history reports and call recordings, explains Kelly Tatlow, CEO, Ray White Concierge:
“RingCentral allows us to better monitor our productivity, and work with our agents on their particular development areas, so that we can now focus our coaching and training for individual team members. Breaking down the volume of calls per hour into skills, teams and agents is very helpful to compare performance within our teams and to compare the volume of calls different teams can achieve.”
Using RingCentral Contact Centre has improved both customer service and processes for supervisors, and enabled Concierge to deliver a number of innovations, which were invaluable during the 2021 lockdowns in Brisbane.
“The flexibility provided by RingCentral’s browser-based application has made it easy for team members to work from home. We have transitioned completely to soft phones, which has given us more space on our desks, and a neater and cleaner environment and user experience for our agents,” said Tatlow.
RingCentral has also given Concierge greater flexibility and speed in moving agents between different teams and departments. From an outbound perspective, “the ability to change the caller ID via skills easily through the ACD function to switch between calling from mobiles, landlines, New Zealand and Australian numbers has been a big innovation for our business,” said Tatlow.
Tatlow highlights enhanced real-time supervisor features and call back functions as significantly improving performance and customer experience in the contact centre. Compliance has also improved through RingCentral’s ‘Launch Call Recording’ and ‘Masking’ functions.
“We are also looking to use RingCentral Contact Centre’s capabilities to manage calls for other Ray White departments and interstate teams, with RingCentral’s flexibility allowing Concierge to easily set up agents in other corporate offices nationally,” said Tatlow.
Migrating to RingCentral MVP
The relocation of Ray White’s Adelaide corporate office in mid-2020 gave the business its first opportunity to trial RingCentral as the replacement national telephony platform. The Adelaide migration to RingCentral MVP was “seamless”, said Cowie, with Ray White successfully completing the migration of its Brisbane and Perth offices to RingCentral MVP in October and November 2021, using its own in-house team. The implementation is planned to continue for all corporate offices.
The business also has confidence in the speed and ease with which it can deploy RingCentral to incorporate any future acquisitions, and is exploring how it can extend RingCentral’s benefits for its 1,000 franchisees – “there are some really good use cases for property management and administrative functions within these businesses where RingCentral would make an ideal solution,” said Cowie.
RingCentral’s out-of-the-box integration with Google Workspace gives users single sign-on access to both sets of applications. The main feature in use is ‘click-to-call’ functionality in their Google Workspace and CRM applications. “Having these micro efficiencies provides a better user experience for our internal teams,” said Cowie.
Ultimately, moving core functionality like telephony out of the data centre and into the cloud has freed up Ray White to continue executing on its long-term cloud migration strategy.
“Moving to RingCentral has mitigated the risk associated with our contact centre relying on legacy data centre infrastructure and given us a better product, which has been great for our business,” Cowie concluded.
Originally published 16 Feb, 2022, updated 18 Feb, 2022
