Highlights:
- Improved experience: With RingCentral Contact Center powering support operations, the organization can more efficiently connect people calling with inquiries or referrals.
- Streamlined workflows: Integrating RingCentral with productivity apps such as Salesforce, OneLogin, and Google Chrome helps create efficiencies for the staff.
- Reduced costs: By eliminating telephony hardware and service contracts for their legacy system, the nonprofit is saving money—money the team can use to help people.
A leading service provider for children and adults with developmental disabilities
Founded in 1883 as one of the first US schools offering education to children with developmental disabilities, Bancroft has grown to become a leading nonprofit provider of services to individuals of all ages with autism, brain injuries, and other disabilities.
Today, Bancroft’s wide range of services includes special education schools, day programs, residential services, behavioral therapy, and neurological rehabilitation. The organization’s caregivers help thousands of people each year achieve greater levels of independence.
Outgrowing a legacy phone system
Fina Nash, SVP of Business Operations & Innovation, explains that Bancroft operated for years with an on-prem phone system. As that system’s contract approached its renewal date, Fina’s team conducted a thorough internal review—forming focus groups, surveying employees, and engaging a consulting firm—to determine the organization’s telephony needs going forward.
Their assessment revealed that Bancroft would benefit tremendously from a cloud-based, unified communications platform. And after researching the major providers in the industry, Fina says, RingCentral was the clear choice for several reasons.
“RingCentral hit all the requirements on our list: ease of use and administration, great reporting and analytics, and a unified platform for phone, messaging, and video conferencing. Also—and this one was big for us—RingCentral offered easy integrations with many apps, especially Salesforce, which is central to a lot of our key workflows.”
Improving efficiencies with RingCentral
Since rolling out the RingCentral platform across the organization, Fina notes, employees have found many ways to improve their workflows and increase efficiencies with their new cloud communication tools.
“We’re finding a lot of people using the RingCentral mobile app on their own phones, so they can take and make work calls anywhere without having to share their personal numbers. That’s making their lives easier and at the same time allowing them to be more responsive to coworkers and our external partners.”
Employees are also streamlining and improving their workflows and saving time with the built-in RingCentral Video. “Before COVID, we just didn’t do virtual meetings. Our staff would often travel an hour to have in-person meetings. With RingCentral Video, those employees can easily have those meetings by video conference—which means less time traveling and more time being productive.”
Creating a better caller experience with RingCentral Contact Center
While the organization was rolling out RingCentral’s cloud-based phone, messaging, and video platform, Bancroft’s marketing and communications department approached the IT group asking for a more sophisticated contact center solution for their admission team’s support agents. Fina’s team found that solution with RingCentral Contact Center.
“Our admissions specialists receive a high volume of calls with inquiries about specific services we offer and from our partners referring individuals to us,” Fina explains. “Contact Center lets us create the call queues and skills-based routing to connect callers with the right specialists quickly and deliver a better experience.”
RingCentral Contact Center proved so helpful to Bancroft’s admissions team’s operations, in fact, that other teams across the organization implemented it.
“Our admissions department, our marketing department, and our IT team all use RingCentral Contact’s call queues, skills-based routing, the analytics engine, and the Salesforce integration to help those teams deliver a better experience to both our internal and external customers.”
Adding more value with RingCentral’s app integrations
As Fina also points out, Bancroft’s employees are also creating new efficiencies with the integrations the team is finding in the RingCentral App Gallery.
Benjamin Baez, Director of Business Systems & Integrations, cites a few examples. “Our employees spend a lot of time in Google applications, so giving the Google Chrome Extension for RingCentral is great because it gives them key telecom capabilities right in their browser or their other Google apps.”
Benjamin adds: “The ability to make RingCentral more effective through integrations has been very helpful. For example, we’ve improved our support and marketing operations with the Salesforce integration, enhanced security with the OneLogin integration… and we’re using RingCentral APIs to build a custom integration with BetterCloud to automatically provision and deactivate users, which will save IT lots of time.”
Cutting telephony costs
Although Bancroft has added a tremendous amount of new functionality by replacing its legacy phone infrastructure with the cloud-based RingCentral, this migration is actually creating several money-saving opportunities.
“A lot of our employees who had desktop phones chose to get rid of them when we showed them that they could get the same phone capabilities—and many more, in fact—from anywhere using the RingCentral soft phone, the web app, and the mobile. As our staff sheds their physical phones, that’s saving us money on hardware and maintenance.”
Fina also adds that because employees have all added the RingCentral mobile app to their personal cell phones, employees who travel no longer need a Bancroft-issued mobile phone, which is also going to save the organization money over time.
And as she points out, for Bancroft, those cost reductions can have a direct, positive impact on the people the organization cares for. “Every dollar we save in operating expenses is a dollar we can put toward improving people’s lives.”
Originally published Mar 09, 2022, updated Aug 07, 2024
