Railserve provides safe and reliable rail services for manufacturing companies. Operating at more than 65 locations across the US and Canada, with 1,000+ employees, we are the largest provider of these services in the US. Our customers include 16 Fortune 500 companies, as well as three of the top privately owned companies and six leading internationally owned companies.
Part of my job at Railserve is making sure our employees have the technology they need to do their jobs. At each of our sites, there are people doing traditional office tasks indoors, as well as people working outside with the rail cars. Their technology needs differ, which is something I keep in mind.
Five years ago, I chose Google Apps for Work as our company’s business software platform. I saw security advantages to having critical apps (such as Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Calendar) based in the cloud. And I liked that people could access these apps and their data with a range of devices, including computers, phones, and tablets.
When it came time to upgrade our telephone system, I wanted to build on that decision, which has proved to be a good one, and transition us to a cloud-based VoIP solution. My requirements were: support for the differing needs of our workforce, integration with Google apps, and a system I could maintain easily myself.
RingCentral met my requirements completely.
In terms of supporting everyone, RingCentral runs on all of the devices our employees use, from computers, laptops and tablets indoors to mobile phones outside. For their mobile devices, people simply install the RingCentral app to get all of the communications functionality they would have in the office. This gives a lot more functionality to the employees who work outside the office, which is the majority of our workforce.
The integration of RingCentral with the Google apps is really important to me because it’s a way of helping employees be more productive. For example, they can make and receive calls in Gmail, where they also have all of the call control options they would have in RingCentral, such as mute, transfer, record and hold. They can click to dial any phone number in their Gmail contacts. They can also schedule a RingCentral meeting or audio conference from within Google calendar.
Besides improving productivity, I’m noticing another benefit of the Google-RingCentral integration: more collaboration among our different sites. Perhaps this is because it’s so easy now for people to reach one another. When they don’t have to leave one of the Google apps to reach another employee, they seem to do it more often.
Finally, in terms of ease of management, RingCentral is great. There’s no need to bring in outside expertise like there would be with a PBX system. I manage all of our 72 users at all of our locations myself, and can easily add users and locations when necessary.
For me, RingCentral is a natural part of my company’s transition to the cloud. In meeting my needs for management simplicity along with the diverse communications requirements of our workforce, RingCentral is our phone system for the future.
Originally published Dec 15, 2016, updated Aug 12, 2020
