Platinum Estates is an independent, family business that specialises in residential sales and lettings, landlord services and property management across the Crawley areas. With a single office and a 10-strong team, the company prides itself on the service it provides clients.
Platinum Estates uses RingCentral to provide clients with better customer service and support, enabling it to respond to emergency landlord and tenant issues and answer vendor queries promptly.
“As a small business operating in a small part of the UK, word-of-mouth goes a long way for us,” said David. “Communication with clients who are often going through a stressful period of their lives is the lifeblood of our business, so we need to have the best technology in place to provide the best possible customer service.”
“Since implementing RingCentral’s cloud-based communication system, we’ve seen a big improvement in customer satisfaction. The system allows us to put in place an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service, to ensure customers can always get through to the right person at the right time. If that person is out of the office, the call is instantly diverted to their mobile or the next available member of staff in the office, to ensure we never miss a call.”
“In our line of work, employees need the flexibility of working from home or on the road. Thanks to our RingCentral phone system, they have flexibility to work from any location they choose while still being fully connected,” said David. “We now have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy in place so that employees have the freedom to use their own smartphone or tablet and, using RingCentral’s mobile application, they can route calls on the fly and get voicemail messages emailed to them. It’s a win-win situation really, as it means staff are also always 100% flexible and productive.”
Prior to implementing RingCentral, Platinum Estates used a traditional PBX system, meaning they were always tied to their desk and struggled to give clients the level of customer service they hoped to when they were on the move.
“We realised we needed to change our communication system when we were moving offices and wanted a system that would be easy to take with us without facing any technical issues. Our traditional PBX system would have been tiresome to move to our new offices as we would have faced downtime between transporting it and getting it all re-installed again, meaning we could have lost potential clients that struggled to get hold of us. Thanks to our cloud-based RingCentral system, if we were to move offices again in future, we can easily route calls to our mobiles during the move and simply plug our telephones in again without any technical difficulty at all.”
“As a small business, the system works for us financially too. These days, around 85% of the calls we make are to mobile numbers, and with our previous system, we faced extortionate costs at the end of the month as a result. With RingCentral, it’s much more affordable to call out to mobiles and the operational costs are very transparent so there are never any nasty surprises. As the system is cloud-based, we can scale and expand the business as needed, we can add more users and lines at the click of a button.
“What I love about the system is that it’s so easy to use – every member of my team can now change the voicemail and auto-receptionist settings without any help at all, which is something I was always stuck doing on my own with our previous system. Each employee can now also configure their own phones to suit them. It no longer takes a technical mind to figure out.”
“Our clients are often people that are going through a very important and stressful period of their lives. That’s why we’re always exploring new and innovative ways of communicating with them and providing the best possible customer service for them. As we continue to grow and expand in the future, we aim to continue using innovative yet affordable technology like RingCentral to help us be the best we can be in our industry.”
Originally published Sep 15, 2015, updated Aug 11, 2020
