Ready for a positive business story in the era of COVID-19? One of the world’s top self-storage companies has found a way to maintain operations across its thousands of facilities—and keep its large staff employed—through this pandemic.
The company’s strategy: Leverage their cloud-based, work-from-anywhere communications solution to enable everyone in the organization to collaborate, communicate, and serve customers from home.
A Different Type of Disaster Leads to Cloud Communications
The organization actually switched to RingCentral’s all-in-one cloud-communications solution long before the coronavirus outbreak. Senior management decided to move off its legacy phone system, and do so as quickly as possible, when a series of rolling outages took down phone service to many of its locations over the course of a week and a half.
In researching their telephony options, several factors led the IT team to the unified communications solution from RingCentral—including the company’s reputation for platform stability, RingCentral’s ability to implement solutions rapidly for new customers, the wide range of integrated communication features available, and the solution’s future capabilities.
Of course, as it was rolling out RingCentral’s cloud-communications solution to all of its locations and employees, the company had no idea that one of those “future capabilities” would be its ability to respond to a worldwide viral pandemic by transitioning immediately to a 100% remote staff.
A Rollout So Quick and Smooth it Shocked the Company
With contracts signed, the IT team prepared itself and the rest of the organization for what it assumed would be a slow and frustrating migration to their new communications solution—but it turns out the transition period was neither slow nor frustrating.
“We deployed RingCentral to thousands of locations in just three weeks,” says an IT executive with the self-storage company. “It was unbelievable. I’m convinced that no vendor besides RingCentral could’ve done this.”
RingCentral Helps Keep Revenue Coming in… and Paychecks Going Out
When the COVID-19 outbreak led to stay-at-home orders across many of the states the executive staff decided to transition all of its hundreds of sales and support agents to work-from-home arrangements.
As the company’s IT leadership points out, if they had attempted such a significant shift in operations in such a short timeframe with their previous phone system, the adjustment would have proven costly, highly disruptive, and terrible for both the customer experience and employee morale.
But thanks to RingCentral, the company’s agents can make and take calls and host video conferences from anywhere, using their computers or even their smartphones. Also, with the RingCentral app’s built-in team messaging capabilities, the team can have one-on-one online chats as well as conversation threads involving larger groups.
Because the organization had all of these digital communication capabilities available in their all-in-one RingCentral solution, their transition to remote work took just a few days. And the transition itself was extremely smooth and efficient.
“As we adjust to the new reality of this pandemic, we’re in triage mode trying to figure out how to continue supporting our normal operations,” the IT executive explains. “But thanks in large part to this unified cloud system we all share—which lets us communicate, collaborate, share files, add tasks, and message each other important updates—we’re in a strong position to get through this.”
Originally published Apr 07, 2020, updated Aug 12, 2020
