Highlights:
- Creating efficiencies: Consolidating voice, text, digital fax, and Contact Center onto a unified platform helps the organization run more efficiently than ever.
- Delighting customers: RingCentral Contact Center IVRs, Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration, and other features help the team continually improve customer service.
- Increasing teamwork: Integrating RingCentral into the company’s Microsoft Teams environment is helping employees collaborate and communicate more effectively.
A top-10 fan-favorite NFL team
The youngest team in the National Football League, the Houston Texans are already six-time champions of their AFC South Division. And according to a 2022 Forbes report, the Texans have built the 11th most valuable team in the NFL.
Time to trade an underperforming phone system
Jeff Schmitz, the Texans’ Vice President, and CIO, explains that the organization had been using an underperforming phone system for several frustrating seasons – right up until the beginning of the COVID lockdowns.
“Everything was a challenge with that phone system – even simple adds, changes, and other basic administrative tasks. That meant we had to bring in costly consultants to help us just about any time we needed to make an adjustment to our phone environment.”
Frustrated also by the phone system’s lack of integration with the Texans’ CRM platform, Microsoft Dynamics, Jeff and his team went looking for a new solution. Their main goal, he explains, was to find a single cloud platform that could address the whole organization’s communication needs – phone, text, electronic fax, Contact Center, mobility, analytics, etc. – and that teams across the company could easily manage on their own.
RingCentral provides the all-in-one solution the team needed
Derek Beeman, Vice President of Ticket and Event Sales for the Texans, explains that the primary reason RingCentral stood out among the field of cloud communication providers was the capability and flexibility of RingCentral Contact Center.
The Texans, Derek notes, have a complicated call center operation with dozens of sales and support agents speaking with many types of customers – including season ticket holders, candidates for group sale purchases, and people interested in buying tickets for the stadium’s many non-Texans events. Creating an excellent experience for callers requires the ability to create and quickly adjust automated greetings, menu options, extensions, and call queues.
As Derek explains, “What we found so impressive with RingCentral Contact Center is how flexible the system is and how easy it is to create and update the IVRs so callers can easily direct themselves to the right people.”
RingCentral and Microsoft Dynamics create an all-star team
Derek also notes that his sales and support teams are benefiting tremendously from the RingCentral for Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration, which is both improving these teams’ efficiencies and helping them improve the customer experience.
“The fact our agents can make and take calls through the RingCentral widget right in their Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment – and see screen pops of a customer’s history with us – is helping those reps work more efficiently, making their lives easier, and helping them have more personal and productive conversations with our customers.”
The RingCentral integration with Microsoft Teams adds even more efficiencies
Another benefit of deploying RingCentral across the Texans’ organization, explains Bobby Rawlinson, Director of IT Service Delivery, is that it eliminated the staff’s dependence on physical desk phones and empowered all employees to use their business numbers wherever they were. This mobility, says Bobby, proved invaluable during the lockdowns.
“We rolled out RingCentral in 2021, during COVID, and we hadn’t fully come back to the office. But because now every employee could make and receive business calls from their PC or cell phone and our customer-facing teams would join call groups remotely, we were able to continue serving customers through the lockdown period.”
And because the Texans staff had begun using Microsoft Teams for internal messaging during the lockdowns, Jeff and his team found the RingCentral integration for Teams to be an extremely valuable addition to the organization’s workflows.
“We’ve found the RingCentral phone system has a lot more functionality and flexibility than Microsoft Teams’ native phone service,” Jeff says. “So, the RingCentral integration with Teams has been a great way for us to give that convenient, anywhere phone capability to our employees who spend a lot of time in the Teams environment.”
Helping the sales and support staff continue deliver for fans
The greatest impact RingCentral has had on the Texans organization, Jeff and his team agree, is on dramatically improving the customer-facing teams’ ability to deliver a great experience to callers.
As Senior System Administrator Anthony Shade explains, “Our sales and support supervisors can log into the RingCentral Contact Center dashboard and see what’s happening with all of their agents. They can listen in on a call, whisper in an agent’s ear to help, even join the call if necessary. These things have been great for onboarding new agents, coaching our existing team, and just generally making the Texans customer experience continuously better.”
Originally published Aug 07, 2023, updated Aug 05, 2024
