Highlights:
- Business continuity: RingCentral’s 99.999% uptime and multiple data centers give the company the redundancy it needs to continue delivering outstanding service.
- Improved operations: RingCentral’s unified voice, video, and messaging app helps employees increase their mobility, productivity, and accessibility.
- Lower costs: Consolidating communication services onto one platform and eliminating the need for third-party administration has helped save the company money.
The world’s largest provider of truck scale facilities
For more than 50 years, the name Iowa 80 has been synonymous with North American trucking. The company’s subsidiary businesses include the world’s largest truck weighing company (CAT Scale) — with thousands of locations across the US and Canada — and the industry’s leading online store for trucking accessories (Iowa80.com).
Iowa 80 is also the company behind the world’s largest truckstop, which serves more than 5,000 customers every day.
A phone-downtime risk they couldn’t afford
Iowa 80 is one of the most successful truck-service businesses in North America. The company’s CAT Scale subsidiary alone has more than 2,000 locations. Given the millions of customers the company serves each year across its various facilities — which include fueling stations, truck washes, and retail stores — the company couldn’t afford to continue using a phone system that left it vulnerable to outages.
“We had no disaster recovery for our phones,” explains Rob Henry, Iowa 80 Group’s CIO & CTO. “If our servers or network went down here at the Iowa headquarters, it could take down phone service completely. That posed an ongoing threat to our call center agents, many of whom need to be accessible to customers literally 24/7.”
RingCentral provides disaster recovery — and many other benefits
The primary factor that drew Rob and his team to RingCentral was that it solved the single-point-of-failure problem for Iowa 80 Group’s telephony environment.
“I read up on RingCentral and found that the company serves as its own carrier and has multiple data centers that are geographically distributed — all of which means that if there’s ever a problem, we can resume normal operations very quickly.”
But beyond helping to ensure business continuity, Rob says, RingCentral also delivered several other operational benefits to the company. One example is RingCentral Contact Center, which the company uses to power the customer service operations for its CAT Scale and Iowa80.com divisions.
“RingCentral Contact Center makes it easy for our customer service teams to manage their own IVRs and call queues. And because it works on any device, it lets us expand our pool of agent candidates to basically everywhere. These are things we couldn’t do with the old system, and they’ve definitely improved our customer experience.”
Another way RingCentral has helped Iowa 80 Group improve its customer service, Rob explains, is by giving management significantly more visibility into the company’s operations — and the functionality to adjust those operations on the fly when necessary.
“We would send one agent into our call center on weekends. After we switched to RingCentral, an agent assigned to the office one weekend left without telling anyone. With our old system, those calls would’ve gone unanswered all weekend. But RingCentral sent an alert to the supervisor after the first missed call, and he was able to log in on his laptop and take calls at home. We’re finding benefits like this from RingCentral all across the company.”
Improving operations with unified communications
Another benefit of RingCentral, Rob notes, is that his team has been able to both consolidate IT communication services onto a single platform and offer Iowa 80 Group employees far more communication capabilities than they had previously.
“We’re using pretty much everything on the RingCentral app: voice, video conferencing, SMS texting, voicemail, even electronic faxing,” says Rob. “And to give you one example of the benefits of this, our in-house recruiters are having huge success with texting. It’s a great way to keep employee candidates up-to-date during the process, and our recruiters can now easily exchange those text messages from their business numbers no matter where they are.”
Lowering telephony costs
Although switching to RingCentral has given Iowa 80 Group significantly more communication capabilities than they’ve ever had, Rob points out that the migration actually reduced the company’s telecommunication expenses.
“We were paying about $2,000 a month for a digital faxing vendor, but we’ve eliminated that expense because it’s included with RingCentral. We’re also no longer paying for in-house phone servers, or to have consultants manage our system, or even for the ridiculous costs to maintain our old analog lines. And of course, if we didn’t have RingCentral when the pandemic started, we would’ve had to pay yet another vendor for video conferencing licenses.”
Grateful for a highly reliable, highly responsive technology partner
As beneficial as Iowa 80 Group has found their new telephony capabilities, Rob points out that the most important benefit of migrating to RingCentral is the reliability and redundancy of the system — which enables the company to continue expanding without any fear that the rapid growth could tax their phone system.
“As the head of technology for an international company, I naturally worry about all the things that could go wrong and negatively affect our operations. That’s part of the job. But one thing I never worry about anymore is our telephony — not since we switched to RingCentral.
In addition to the reliability of the platform itself, Rob adds that his high degree of confidence in RingCentral also comes from his experience working with the company’s people. “Whenever we have a question or need help, the RingCentral team is extremely responsive and helps us right away — and we’ve had that experience consistently since well before the implementation.”
Originally published Sep 12, 2023
