Why RingCentral Video Is SEA Media’s “Ninja Weapon”

By mid-2015, SEA was on the cusp of a major growth spurt. Moore wanted to position the company for growth and be able to handle it when it arrived. As she developed her methodology and built her team, she found herself doing too much micromanaging. She had standards she was determined to uphold, but she could see that the way she was doing it would soon become unsustainable.

What she needed was a way of keeping all team members in close communication and aware of what everyone else was doing, regardless of the fact that SEA is a distributed organization where everyone works from a home office. Moore is in Dayton, Ohio, but has recruited other team members in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and California. In addition to improving communication, she wanted to make all the firm’s processes more disciplined so everything that needed to get done on a daily or weekly basis would get done without fail—and customers would never fail to be impressed by the quality of SEA’s work.

Before picking RingCentral Video, Moore considered several other team messaging and collaboration tools. She picked RingCentral Video because it provides more of the team productivity features she needed in one package. Like other team messaging tools, RingCentral Video provides an efficient alternative to email communication.

Instead of having to sort through tangled email threads, or sort important messages from spam and low-priority email, RingCentral Video organizes all the most important work messages and shared files into focused team conversations. When typing messages back and forth is not enough, Moore can connect with her people in real time. RingCentral Video Chat, which is based on RingCentral Meetings™, allows the distributed team to meet face-to-face and do screen sharing.

What Moore values most of all is how RingCentral Video makes creating tasks and events on the team calendar as easy as sending a message.

“You can go from idea to execution, just like that!” she says, snapping her fingers. Integrated task management is one reason she picked RingCentral Video over better-known competitors, and it paid off, she says.

Still, just using RingCentral Video wasn’t enough, Moore says. “At first, we weren’t using it efficiently.” Then she got serious about organizing her project teams and mapping processes into RingCentral Video to maximize its value. For example, SEA color-codes tasks to be performed for clients (blog updates, Facebook, Pinterest), so it is easy to see at a glance what’s happening within any project team.

In addition, Moore began routinely providing guest accounts to customers, such as the Creative Images Institute of Cosmetology in Dayton, so they can collaborate with SEA Media as if it were an extension of their own organizations.

The clients who actively engage through RingCentral Video see exactly what work SEA is doing for them on a daily basis. For the rest, a screenshot of color-coded activities displayed on the RingCentral Video Calendar is a handy tool for showing clients everything the agency has done on their behalf, Moore says. Those who might be tempted to dismiss social media as all fun and games think twice when they see the long list of checked-off tasks, she says. “That’s when they realize there is no way I could do all that— no way I could duplicate that — so where do I sign?”

RingCentral Video became even more useful when Moore discovered its Zapier integration for automated notifications based on events in other cloud services. Now, whenever she uploads a document into a folder for contracts on Google Drive, that triggers a notification in RingCentral Video for her team. As a result, her team immediately gets to work bringing the new client on board.

“RingCentral Video is essential for us,” says Logan Riley, a consultant on Moore’s team. RingCentral Video recurring tasks are particularly important for helping her stay organized since many of the tasks she performs for clients, such as updating Facebook ads, need to be done on a weekly basis. With the mobile app, she adds, “I can be anywhere and pull RingCentral Video up on my phone to make a task right there so I don’t forget about it later.”

When Riley is preparing to post a blog or send out a marketing email broadcast, she first shares it with the client and with other team members using the RingCentral Video Notes tool — a web-based word processor used to publish documents and invite feedback. Collaborators on a note can easily mark it up, adding comments associated with specific parts of a document such as a headline or a paragraph that needs to be revised. The RingCentral Video interactive viewer for images provides similar functionality for marking up images.

Even better, Moore says, the annotations on a note or image can be structured as tasks. “On one note, I may have five people I need to task with something, and I can tag each of them so they know it’s relevant to them,” she says.