More and more businesses are giving their employees the freedom to work from anywhere. 50% of Australian workplaces now offer hybrid work, according to the Reinventing Work Report, published by Adaptavist. This puts it ahead of other countries including the UK and US.
But for IT leaders, flexible working comes with challenges. How do you give workers access to their business phone from multiple devices? How do you get new people up and running quickly on company systems? And plenty more.
While there are challenges, it is possible for businesses of all sizes to run a flexible working model and thrive. We know because we’ve helped countless firms do it. Here are stories from three of them.
TechnologyOne unites staff worldwide
TechnologyOne (ASX: TNE) is Australia’s largest enterprise software company and one of Australia’s top 150 ASX-listed companies. It has offices in six countries. But the firm was struggling with multiple communication challenges.
An expansion into the UK had pushed its ageing telephone system to breaking point, plus the firm’s call centre solution wasn’t integrated with other systems and so agents couldn’t offer a good customer experience. Even the company’s video conferencing software wasn’t up to scratch.
To address these issues, TechnologyOne opted to unify its communications solutions with RingCentral. The firm now has a single system for telephony, call centre, video conferencing, as well as team chat and collaboration. Communication has dramatically improved as a result.
“RingCentral has been great for uniting our entire company across all offices, globally, and helping everyone communicate and connect more effectively. Having all of these tools on the same solution around the world helps us train people and makes it easy for us to stay connected.” Jacqueline Ho, IT Director, TechnologyOne.
Journey Beyond gains remote work capability and a better CX
Journey Beyond is Australia’s leading experiential tourism group and runs 13 brands across the country. It’s part of the Hornblower Group, which operates with an entirely remote workforce.
Having grown through acquisitions, Journey Beyond had inherited six different phone systems (which mostly had basic functionality) and an outdated contact centre solution. This disjointed technology stack made it difficult to offer remote-working to its employees – meaning it was at odds with its parent company – and was a barrier to providing a consistent, unrivalled customer experience across all its tourism ventures.
The company chose to switch to RingCentral’s integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platforms and can now run operations 24×7 with centralised administration, and distributed users, working from anywhere, on any device. This new remote-working capability also means the firm can now recruit talent from a wider area.
With the integrated contact centre solution, CX has improved dramatically too. Teams can now get a 360-degree view of the customer, can route calls more easily to subject matter experts, and can align agent availability with customer demand.
“Now we have a single RingCentral UC platform across the business, which has been fantastic for us to support centrally…it works like a charm.” Madhumita Mazumdar, General Manager Information & Communications Technology, Journey Beyond.
TFI improves collaboration and staff productivity
Thomas Foods International (TFI) is one of Australia’s largest family-owned food businesses, with teams in Australia, the US, China, Japan and Europe.
Having acquired several businesses, TFI Australia had inherited multiple, disconnected PABX systems. Many of these systems were reaching the end of their support and PSTN services were being shut down at a number of TFI’s locations. But as Matt Kruschel, CIO of Thomas Foods International says, “out of the crisis came an opportunity.”
That opportunity was switching to unified communications. TFI implemented RingCentral MVP across all of its seven sites in under three weeks. The cloud-based platform has improved collaboration between the multiple business units, and has increased the mobility and effectiveness of TFI Australia staff:
“Through the RingCentral mobile app, communication with our endpoints can move seamlessly with our users. If staff were out of the office, they used to forward their calls to their mobiles, which took them off our PABX. That had a big negative impact on our productivity.” Matt Kruschel, CIO, Thomas Foods International.
What’s their secret?
All three organisations recognised that it was time to switch to cloud communications. They ditched tired, legacy systems and disjointed infrastructure in favour of one unified communications solution: RingCentral MVP and RingCentral Contact Centre.
RingCentral helps organisations of all sizes gain newfound flexibility. Our research with customers shows that it increases employee mobility and productivity, as well as customer satisfaction. And with benefits like scalability, a lower TCO, and a 99.999% uptime SLA, it’s the perfect choice for larger organisations.
You can read the full case study for each organisation and discover more in our eBook: Triumph in the work-from-anywhere era.
Originally published 13 Oct, 2023, updated 29 Nov, 2023
