Neighborly
RingCentral Helps the World’s Top Home Services Franchisor Get the Job Done
Oh, it’s a phone… a fax… a conference bridge… a meeting platform… a messaging app. Oh, and I can do any of it from anywhere in the world.
Whether your house has a plumbing emergency, needs an appliance fixed, or is due for a window cleaning, there’s a good chance that even without realizing it, you’ll call the same company.
Neighborly has become the world’s largest franchisor of home service businesses. You might have never heard of them directly, but you know Neighborly through its high-profile brands such as Molly Maid, Glass Doctor, Mr. Rooter Plumbing, Five Star Painting, and Window Genie. All of these service businesses—and many others—are part of the Neighborly family.
The company’s vision is simple but bold: If you need any type of service for your home or office, Neighborly’s online platform will connect you with the best-trained experts in your area.
To achieve this goal, Neighborly has developed a brilliant and repeatable system to grow its franchise organization. The company signs up local service-business owners as franchisees, trains them on running a Neighborly-brand business, and uses the company’s size and purchasing power to help these franchisees acquire the equipment they need at the best prices possible.
This model has proven so successful that today Neighborly’s network consists of 3,900 franchisees, across more than a dozen service specialties, serving millions of customers around the world.
But to maintain its fast-paced growth, Neighborly needed a contact center solution capable of scaling just as quickly.
The business’s success outpaced its phone capabilities
Michigan. At the time, in addition to its Texas headquarters, Neighborly also had locations in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and elsewhere. The company added many of these offices through acquisitions and each had its own phone system.
As hard as the IT team tried to make all of these disparate phone systems and communication platforms work together, they found it increasingly difficult to keep a sense of cohesion among the geographically distributed employees and thousands of franchisees. Faced with integrating the new Michigan location, the company decided to look for a more scalable contact center solution.
As they began their research, Neighborly’s IT team realized this transition to a new contact center platform would also be a great time to add more digital communication capabilities for the company’s employees, if they could find all of these services in one unified solution.
Here’s how Preston Williams, the company’s Director of Network and Infrastructure, describes what they discovered: “As we looked at contact center solutions, our wish list kept growing—video conferencing, webinars, voicemail, IVRs, and so on. The more tools we added to our list, the more vendors fell away until only RingCentral was left.”
We were acquiring a new company every other month. We needed a communication solution that would let us easily plug each new business into the company network.
Feeling at home right away with RingCentral
Preston and his team were able to roll out RingCentral’s all-in-one solution to dozens of the company’s locations without a single challenge. Whether they onboarded a small group of employees onto the RingCentral system or deployed it to an office with more than 100 people, everything went exactly according to plan.
And when they realized how many new communication tools they had anywhere, anytime access to with their new RingCentral accounts, Neighborly’s employees began using all of them right away. Preston summarizes the typical Neighborly team member’s reaction this way.
Seeing big benefits
With RingCentral Contact Center, Neighborly’s support department now has a flexible system that lets support agents log in to their call queues even when they’re not in the office. All they need is the RingCentral app on their computers or phones, and they can hop into the Help Desk and support their employees or franchise owners from anywhere.
And with RingCentral’s built-in team messaging app, the contact center agents can even chat in real-time—to make sure more than one person isn’t handling the same issue, for example, or to get an urgent question out to the whole team simultaneously.
RingCentral’s live reports also help ensure the Help Desk teams are performing up to Neighborly’s rigorous service standards. “I don’t want anybody sitting on hold,” Preston explains. “The live reports let me see how many people are on a call, what our queue times are, and whether we’re meeting our SLAs.”
One additional bonus, which the company hadn’t even planned on, is the ability to train its franchisees via video conference, using the built-in RingCentral Meetings.
“We normally fly in hundreds of franchisees at a time to our Waco headquarters for training,” says Preston. “Now we can easily do the same thing virtually, in a webinar format, and still offer the same level of training and support. This is really helping our business grow.”