Highlights:
- Improved collaboration: Migrating employees onto RingCentral’s unified app for phone, messaging, video, and integrated workflow tools, Bennett has improved communication and collaboration.
- Cost savings: Bennett replaced most in-person employee meetings, many of which required flights, with RingCentral Video meetings, which significantly lowered costs.
- Customer experience: Using RingCentral Contact Center’s skills-based routing and other features, the company has been able to improve customer service operations.
One of the world’s largest specialty transportation providers
When thousands of businesses across the US and around the world need specialty shipping, warehousing, and other supply-chain services, they turn to the Bennett Family of Companies.
With its wide range of subsidiary companies—specializing in domestic trucking, international freight, distribution services, even oil-field support—Bennett has become one of the industry’s most successful logistics providers. In 2021, American Cranes & Transport Magazine named Bennett the 6th largest specialized transportation business in North America.
A telephony system that couldn’t keep pace with Bennett’s growth
Praveen Boppana, Bennett’s Director of Technology, explains that as the organization added more specialty companies to its corporate family, managing a companywide customer support operation became increasingly difficult.
“Our organization is composed of many different business units, each with its own areas of focus, operating in different regions throughout the country. We needed more flexibility than our old phone system offered in terms of configuring call queues, creating skills for routing calls to the right people, and addressing each business’s unique telephony needs.”
And as Bennett’s IT Project Manager James Collett adds, these challenges were further complicated by the fact that the company’s previous phone system wasn’t user-friendly from an admin standpoint. “Even for little things, like adding a user or updating a call queue, we’d need to go to the one person in the company who knew that language.”
As their telephony system reached its end of life, Bennett’s IT team began looking for a better solution—ideally one that could unify phone service, messaging, video, and contact center operations in a single cloud environment. Their search led them to RingCentral.
RingCentral’s unified communications platform proves invaluable during COVID
Praveen notes that Bennett’s employees were just beginning to shift their communications to the RingCentral platform—for calls, team messages, and video meetings—pre-COVID. But as the 2020 quarantines began, companywide adoption accelerated rapidly. In fact, Praveen credits the company’s move to RingCentral with enabling a smooth transition to an unfamiliar working arrangement for the organization.
“Bennett never had much of a remote workforce, so the pandemic posed some culture shock, as we suddenly had to set up all our back-office and operations teams at home. But because everyone had the RingCentral softphone and mobile apps, that transition was smooth. We all had our business numbers, video call capability, and my favorite—team messaging—right on our computers and cell phones.”
Helping the company lower expenses
James also points out that, although it hadn’t been a significant factor in the company’s decision to move to RingCentral, having a built-in video conferencing platform led to savings in travel costs.
“Pre-RingCentral and pre-COVID, we were flying employees to our offices around the country all the time, sometimes just for a one-hour meeting. Now that we’re doing those meetings virtually with RingCentral Video, we’re saving untold money.”
A technical support team Bennett can count on
In addition to the workflow improvements Bennett is enjoying thanks to RingCentral’s features, and the money the platform is saving the company, he notes that he’s also grateful for RingCentral’s Enterprise Support services.
“One of the most impressive things about RingCentral’s support team is how proactive they are. They don’t just wait for us to contact them with a question or issue. They’ll call on us periodically just to make sure we’re doing okay and ask if they can help us with anything. That’s not something you find in most tech support operations.”
RingCentral Contact Center helps improve the customer experience
When the customer service department moved its 75 agents onto RingCentral Contact Center, Praveen explains, Bennett’s support operation became better able than ever to provide an outstanding experience to callers.
“With Contact Center, we can easily set up call queues, assign customer support agents to the right queues based on their areas of expertise, and in general create a better experience for our customers.”
The RingCentral App Gallery helps further enhance the company’s support operations
Finally, Praveen notes, the company is further improving its support workflows with the Zendesk for RingCentral integration.
“When we receive a support call through RingCentral, it automatically creates a ticket in Zendesk. In addition to getting our support group those tickets more quickly, it also lets us see everything that’s happening on the support side without leaving our RingCentral environment. We can monitor how many tickets are open at any moment and the average time it’s taking to close a ticket—which is data we can use to continually improve the customer experience.”
Originally published Mar 09, 2022, updated Jul 30, 2024
