In this series of posts, we’re talking to our own leaders to get insights into the challenges and solutions of the telecommunications industry.
This episode features Louise Newbury-Smith, Regional Vice President for Enterprise Sales. In plain English, Louise leads our people on the ground who are selling to big businesses like News UK. Louise has spent much of her career in telecommunications, occupying director roles for big players including BT and Daisy Group.
Louise, what’s your role at RingCentral and what do you love about your job?
I’m proud to head up the UK Enterprise sales team, reporting to Steve Rafferty who leads EMEA. We endeavour to make our customers’ communications both brilliant and simple, whether that’s internally with their own teams or externally with their end customers. We do that by focussing on their desired outcomes and ensuring we go above and beyond to achieve them.
The team is fantastic, extremely experienced and completely customer-focussed, and my role is to support every member of the team and help them be the best they can be. My aim is for them to achieve their goals, not just in their professional careers, but also for them as individuals, whether that be buying their next house, having financial stability for their families or working towards whatever truly drives them. For me, it’s to buy a horse that will get me to the level of grand prix dressage, but that’s a story for another article!
I love the fact that we have the most amazing product and that this view is shared by our customers. Our position in the market is born of a great strategy and immense hard work across our teams, because we’re focussed on the quality of our delivery. To maintain our position, we’re investing in continuously improving the product and supporting our people – neither works in isolation.
RingCentral has fundamentally changed the way I communicate inside and outside of our business, and I’ve seen us do the same for our customers time and time again. Most people I speak to now view email as a chore, whereas communication through RingCentral makes work fun. It’s an incredible business, where we listen to our customers and constantly improve the product. Every RingCentral customer gets the benefit of those new ideas, from the smallest startup to the largest of our enterprise customers. It’s a unique position to be in, and I’m incredibly proud to be part of it.
RingCentral has fundamentally changed the way I communicate inside and outside of our business, and I’ve seen us do the same for our customers time and time again. Click To Tweet
In what ways has business communications changed over your career?
Speed of execution is one way, enabled through a true cloud model. At a recent Customer Advisory Board, customers told us they would like more help with adoption, so we have added fantastic new tools to help customers understand how their RingCentral services are being used, showing things like varying trends of voice, messaging and video meetings across teams. It also breaks this down by device type, which gives a view of working practices and the levels of mobility across the business. This allows them to understand whether the outcomes for their projects are being delivered and how they are changing the culture of their organisation. It would have taken much longer to deliver had this been attempted in a legacy environment.
If you look at my stats, I am most often doing video meetings, and I will always have my camera on, (makeup or no makeup), as I feel that’s the best way to make real connections with people when we are working remotely. Communications at RingCentral empower users to operate in the way they personally feel most comfortable.
What’s the best piece of advice you can give to a business wishing to improve its communication?
It always makes me feel confident and happy when our customers engage key stakeholders from their business (beyond the obvious ones) as part of their project, ideally at an early stage. This engagement ensures that we understand the business properly, and being inclusive in that way helps us deliver a successful project that everyone is proud to shout about.
As we leave Louise to shout about her projects, we’re reminded that creating business improvements isn’t just about applying technology to a situation – it’s about connecting and empowering a workforce. Is this something that matches your own experience? Do you have advice to offer regarding the future of business communications? We’d love to hear your comments or questions on the topics here. In the meantime, look out for more episodes in this series of Ringside.
Originally published Feb 20, 2020, updated Jan 16, 2023
