With its patented Virtual Gate Guard, Envera Systems has made a significant contribution to improving neighborhood safety and protecting families in their homes. The solution pairs onsite technologies, including innovative access-control panels and surveillance cameras with licensed security guards who remotely monitor and manage the data from those devices in real-time.
Aside from the innovativeness of the tools themselves—including license-plate-recognition software and ATM-style driver’s license readers—what makes Envera’s solutions such a game-changer is that they enable 24/7 hands-on virtual security for a neighborhood at a small fraction of hiring full-time guards. That allows communities that cannot afford an onsite security staff to safeguard their residents and property just as effectively. Additionally, Envera assists those with onsite security by capturing more information and increasing effectiveness through layers of technology.
As tech innovators themselves, the employees of Envera are always looking for ways to leverage technology to improve both the company’s services and its internal operations. One area that needed an upgrade was Envera’s telecommunications infrastructure.
Hurricanes jeopardized phone uptime, which jeopardized customer security
Elliot Hamby, Envera’s Network Manager, explains that the company’s previous phone system presented two major challenges to the company’s ability to stay in contact with customers across the thousand residential communities under Envera’s watch. The first problem was with the phone system itself, and the second was the result of geography.
Envera’s phone calls, including the hundreds of thousands of calls the company’s agents place each month to its customers, ran through an in-house PBX. As Elliot explains: “The system was so buggy and fragile that at one point, after the provider made an update to it on their end, it crashed basically every other day for the next year, and we had to reboot it every time.”
Even to the extent that Elliot’s team could keep the PBX functioning, the company had another ongoing threat to its communications. “We’re in Florida, where hurricanes are a regular threat to communications,” he explains. “And because we had our phone lines with the local carrier, we had no redundancy. When they had an outage, our phones could be down for an entire day. With thousands of calls to make each day to our residents, we just couldn’t afford that.”
Cloud communications ensures uptime and better protection for their customers
With RingCentral’s unified cloud communications solution, Elliot and his team were able to solve all these issues simultaneously—and at the same time give Envera’s staff a far more mobile and feature-rich communications environment than they’d ever had.
Employees are finding many ways to improve their workflows with RingCentral’s cloud platform for anywhere, any-device phone, team messaging, text, and online meetings. As Elliot points out, RingCentral Contact Center and RingCentral Video are providing transformational benefits for Envera’s operations.
Improving operations with RingCentral Contact Center
When a hurricane or PBX glitch took down phone service in the past, Envera’s call center agents often had to contact residents to perform visitor verifications from a different phone number. Because they didn’t recognize the caller as their neighborhood security provider, those residents often didn’t pick up, often leading to frustrated visitors and residents.
“With Contact Center, our agents can always call from the same familiar number, even if they’re on a different device, and even if they’re working from home,” says Elliot. “It’s already had a huge impact on our call center team’s ability to reach residents on the first try—and that has a huge impact on our overall customer experience.”
Contact Center is also improving agents’ efficiency and the customer experience on inbound calls to Envera. “With the RingCentral Salesforce integration, when a resident in one of our communities calls in to our support center, the agent gets a screen-pop showing who the customer is and if they have any outstanding support issues with us.”
Resolving issues faster with RingCentral Video
Elliot also points out that the company’s field technicians—who visit residential communities to support Envera’s access panels and cameras—have also found a creative way to leverage RingCentral Video to improve their workflows.
“Say a field tech goes to one of our communities to check on an issue with a camera or the front-gate access panel, and he needs help. Instead of just trying to explain the problem over the phone, now he can literally show us live on his cell phone, using RingCentral Video. It’s like a real-time troubleshooting session, and it definitely helps us solve problems faster.”
Saving money with RingCentral’s unified suite
Yet another communication function improving Envera’s operations—which the team didn’t even realize RingCentral offered when they began their migration to the platform—is High Volume SMS.
“We were using another texting vendor, but they started having service issues,” he says. “That’s when we realized RingCentral also offered High Volume SMS integrated into the rest of the platform, and we were able to move yet another communication service our staff uses every day onto RingCentral.”
Additionally, when the lockdowns forced Envera to transition most of its 350 employees to remote work—including all contact center agents—the company realized that its unified cloud communications platform enabled its office-based employees to be just as productive from home. And as Elliot explains, that’s already leading to significant cost savings.
“We had a big office for call center operations with expensive ISDN lines. With RingCentral Contact Center, we don’t need any of that anymore, because our staff can work anywhere. RingCentral is going to save us a lot of money.”
Originally published Jul 29, 2021, updated Aug 14, 2024
