Highlights:
- Remote-ready: With RingCentral, Vredevoogd’s staff now have full communication capabilities from any device — and are no longer dependent on desk phones.
- Reliable communications: RingCentral’s 99.999% uptime represents a major improvement over Vredevoogd’s previous outage-prone carrier.
- Cost savings: Although they did not view upgrading to cloud communications as a cost-cutting measure, Vredevoogd is spending less on telecom with RingCentral.
Western Michigan’s most successful HVAC service company
With a half-century track record of quickly and expertly servicing air conditioning units, furnaces, and water heaters, Vredevoogd Heating & Cooling has earned its position as Western Michigan’s largest provider of residential HVAC repair and replacement across Western Michigan.
Ready to replace their on-prem Mitel system
For more than 15 years, Vredevoogd’s phone system was built on an on-prem, VoIP-based system from ShoreTel (which eventually became a Mitel solution after that acquisition).
Mike Sikkema, Vredevoogd’s IT Coordinator, explains that the company’s telephony environment became less stable as their local telecom carrier experienced challenges with its copper-based infrastructure.
And although it had never been an issue prior to 2020 because Vredevoogd has always had an office-based culture, Mike notes that the company realized during the COVID lockdowns that the Mitel system did not offer sufficient remote work capabilities.
“In a business like ours, most of the work comes in by phone. We were ready to move away from the old Mitel desk phones because we wanted to make sure that another sudden shift to remote work wouldn’t be as disruptive as the transition we went through in 2020. We also wanted a phone solution that would be more reliable than the infrastructure provided by the local telecom carrier.”
Two trusted sources suggest RingCentral
As Mike’s team was researching cloud communication solutions — and already leaning toward RingCentral — two trusted sources independently recommended RingCentral as well.
“Our longtime managed service provider, Quantum Leap, suggested RingCentral MVP — both because the solution is outstanding and because they knew RingCentral’s relationship with Mitel would make our transition much more seamless.” Then, Mike explains, “Another business under our parent company migrated to RingCentral and had great results — so at that point, we knew this was the right decision.”
A seamless migration from Mitel to RingCentral
Mike points out that Vredevoogd’s company-wide cutover to RingCentral was surprisingly smooth and uneventful, and he attributes the positive experience to two sources.
“It took very little work to move our telephony environment from the Mitel system to RingCentral,” he says. “Part of that is because of the RingCentral-Mitel partnership, which definitely made the transition run more smoothly. But a big part of it was also the expertise of the Professional Services team. They helped us basically replicate our full telephony setup on our new RingCentral environment, and they were always there to help when we needed them.”
RingCentral’s proprietary Migration Accelerator tool removed the hassle and expedited the RingCentral-Mitel migration process so that what typically would have taken weeks was reduced down to mere days or hours.
For example, by leveraging the Migration Accelerator, user details and existing call flows (IVRs) from the existing Mitel system were automatically extracted and enhanced into ready-to-review reports which the RingCentral Professional Services team then worked alongside Vredevoogd to review and seamlessly provision into RingCentral MVP.
RingCentral offers significant operational benefits
As Mike explains, moving all employees onto the anywhere, any-device RingCentral cloud platform has yielded several major benefits — including increased mobility and reliability, as well as lower overall telecom costs.
“We’ve always had an office-based culture, but we know that we might need the ability anytime to quickly set up many of our employees remotely. RingCentral gives us that peace of mind — knowing any teams, and especially our call center agents, can continue serving customers even if they have to start working from home.”
Another notable improvement, Mike adds, has been service reliability and uptime — an increasing concern with Vredevoogd’s previous telecom carrier. “Our local phone provider’s copper infrastructure was getting a bit unreliable, and we just can’t afford service outages considering how important phone calls are to our business. With RingCentral, we’ve never had any downtime issues. The service is there for us all the time.”
Finally, there’s cost. This, Mike explains, is the benefit that has surprised his team the most, because they did not view this company-wide upgrade to enterprise-caliber cloud communications as a cost-cutting initiative.
“We set up our previous phone system about 15 years ago, so we anticipated that upgrading to any new system would cost us more. But to look at our RingCentral bill at the end of the month and see that we’re actually spending less than we were — even though we’re now getting so much more from our communications solution — that makes us extremely pleased.”
Mitel customers like Vredevoogd that make the switch from their on-premise solution to RingCentral MVP unleash the full potential of an intuitive all-in-one tool with support from dedicated teams, top-notch flexibility, lowered operational costs, and more!
Learn more about the exclusive RingCentral-Mitel partnership here and how it can improve the way you do business.
Originally published Jan 31, 2023, updated Nov 03, 2023
