Highlights:
- Actionable insights: The detailed reporting and analytics in RingCentral Contact Center have helped the team continually improve the customer experience.
- Sales improvements: The RingCentral integration for Salesforce has helped reps accomplish more in the day and have more productive conversations with customers.
- Lower costs: Eliminating phone hardware, canceling costly phone service in Salesforce, and replacing fax machines with digital faxing saves the company money.
A leading supplier of edgebanding and other accessories for builders
Every year, thousands of cabinet builders and other cased-goods manufacturers finish their work with the high-quality edgebanding, T-molding, veneer sheets, and other accessories from Charter Industries.
A leading national distributor of edgebanding and other ancillary products for cabinets, desks, and countertops, Charter Industries is a trusted partner of furniture and cased-goods makers who build products for the retail, healthcare, education, hospitality, and other markets. The company has built such a strong reputation in the industry that Charter Industries has enjoyed 15% to 20% annual growth for several straight years.
Company growth outpaced their phone infrastructure
Prior to RingCentral, Charter Industries used two separate telephony systems – an on-prem, PBX-based system with desk phones and landlines for most of its 150 employees and a set of phone licenses in the company’s Salesforce environment for the sales team.
Bill Ogle, Director of IT for Charter Industries, explains that this disconnected environment created operational challenges.
“One problem was the two systems couldn’t connect, so we couldn’t transfer calls coming into our main number to our sales team’s Salesforce environment. We had to ask callers to hang up and redial a rep’s direct line. Another challenge was that we were using an old, on-prem system for our customer service team – and it just didn’t offer the functionality we needed to consistently deliver a great caller experience.”
RingCentral enables massive efficiencies
Among the many benefits of unifying Charter Industries’ entire organization on the cloud-based RingCentral MVP (Message, Video, Phone) platform, Bill explains, was that it gave the company more mobility than they’d ever had.
“Because the old system really forced us to be in the office to make or receive a call on our work numbers, our sales reps were tied to their desks, or they had to give out their personal cell numbers. With RingCentral, though, we’ve actually been able to allow for a several-day-a-week work-from-home arrangement – something we could never do efficiently before.”
But Bill adds that the biggest benefits for Charter Industries’ sales operation have resulted from implementing the RingCentral for Salesforce integration, which was one of the main reasons Bill’s team chose RingCentral in the first place.
“We’ve seen massive benefits from our RingCentral Salesforce integration. Our reps can now take and make calls just by clicking the customer’s number right in Salesforce, and they can see that customer’s profile and history during the call. Plus, because telephony is now integrated across our company, these sales reps’ call logs will be visible to our customer service agents if that customer calls them.”
RingCentral MVP also helped the company create new efficiencies with fax workflows. As Bill explains, Charter Industries’ previous fax infrastructure consisted of desktop fax machines, which forced employees into the manual, time-consuming workflows of going back and forth to the machine to send or receive paper faxes, manually reviewing incoming documents and distributing them to the appropriate people.
“One of the problems with our fax process, in addition to it just being very inefficient, was that the paper documents often came through to our fax machines unclear and hard to read,” Bill says. “But with the built-in electronic faxing on our RingCentral accounts, we were able to eliminate our physical fax machines and can now just have faxes delivered as PDFs to the right people. It’s so much more efficient.”
Improving the customer experience with RingCentral Contact Center
Deploying RingCentral Contact Center for Charter Industries’ customer service operation, Bill explains, has also led to massive improvements in the company’s customer service operation.
“Our customer service managers can really see everything in RingCentral Contact Center’s reporting dashboards. And using all those new insights, we’ve been able to speed response times, route callers to the right people more quickly, and enact other improvements that have led directly to an improved customer experience.”
In fact, Bill adds, key RingCentral Contact Center features such as the callback option and advanced routing helped create such significant improvements to customer service department’s operations that the company didn’t even need to hire a new agent after one switched roles within the company.
“We had a customer service agent get promoted to the sales team, which left us short-staffed for service calls,” Bill says. “But because we now had RingCentral’s callback option and advanced routing features, our managers realized we were still providing outstanding service to callers and didn’t need to backfill that open position. We now know we can continue handling larger call volume without hiring more agents – and a big part of that is RingCentral Contact Center.”
A telephony system that pays for itself
Finally, Bill notes, the RingCentral migration represents a significant upgrade in the quality and capabilities of Charter Industries’ telephony environment, but without a corresponding increase in cost. In fact, he says, the switchover to RingCentral hasn’t raised Charter Industries’ phone costs at all.
“Between no longer managing phone hardware and landlines, being able to eliminate those separate phone licenses for our Salesforce environment and replacing those costly headsets our old phone system needed to work, RingCentral is actually helping us save money on our communications costs.”
Originally published Aug 23, 2023, updated Jan 16, 2024
