AmCap Insurance
Through a Hurricane or Pandemic, This Florida Insurance Company Has the Phone System to Keep its Operations Covered
RingCentral had all the functionality we needed, and more. It wasn’t going to break the bank, either.
Stacia Falls
Business Transformation Analyst, AmCap Insurance
Very few apartment complexes, condominiums, or office buildings in hurricane-prone Florida would ever be built or sold if the owners couldn’t acquire sufficient property insurance. That’s why the services AmCap Insurance provides are invaluable to the families and businesses in the region.
In fact, American Capital Assurance Corp. (AmCap Insurance) provides commercial property and flood insurance to four of the five US states hit hardest and most frequently by hurricanes: Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Texas.
The company might not make headlines, but AmCap Insurance makes a positive difference in the daily lives of thousands of apartment dwellers, office employees, small business owners, and even the residents of senior-living facilities across all of these states.
AmCap Insurance has been named a “Best Place to Work” by the Tampa Bay Business Journal for several years in a row. It also maintains a rating of “Excellent” from AM Best, the longest standing and most trusted insurance-rating agency.
But as the company transitioned to new headquarters, its IT team needed a solution to a troubling question: How will we continue operating when a hurricane forces our own staff to evacuate?
A phone system that couldn’t travel well in a disaster
Until recently, AmCap Insurance had operated under one of the country’s largest insurance carriers. When it was spun out to operate on its own, the company needed to transition away from the legacy communications equipment it had used under its former parent organization.
As the IT team looked for communications solutions for its new office space, one priority stood out among the others: The new system had to be mobile and flexible enough that the staff could quickly transition to working from home in the event of a natural disaster.
After a disaster such as a hurricane, the ability to continue operations is obviously mission-critical for any business. But it would be particularly important for AmCap Insurance—because a natural disaster is precisely the time the company’s clients would need their property insurer more than ever.
Stacia Falls, AmCap Insurance’s Business Transformation Analyst, investigated cloud-communication solutions, and her research led to a clear decision. “RingCentral had all the functionality we needed, and more,” she says. “It wasn’t going to break the bank, either.”
Now if the office needs to evacuate due to a hurricane, our staff can easily set up to work at home, just by logging into the RingCentral app.
Stacia Falls
Business Transformation Analyst, AmCap Insurance
INDUSTRY
Insurance
HQ
Saint Petersburg, FL
YEAR FOUNDED
2005
EMPLOYEES
50+
Cloud communications insures continued operations in a disaster
When the company rolled out RingCentral’s cloud communications to its staff, Stacia’s team knew they had solved the “evacuation” challenge. If a hurricane did force the company to rapidly transition to working remotely, the staff would no longer have to take their business phones with them and hope they had the cabling and telco service to make them work.
With RingCentral, AmCap Insurance’s staff could access all of their communication capabilities—not only their business phone service but also video conferencing, team messaging, and even online fax—on an app they could use on their computers or smartphones.
Putting their new cloud solution to the test
As it turned out, though, the disaster that eventually forced AmCap Insurance’s entire staff to vacate the company’s offices and work from home was not a hurricane—it was a pandemic.
But as Florida’s shelter-in-place orders were issued in response to COVID-19, and AmCap Insurance had to close its offices, the employees found they already had all of the communication tools they needed to keep doing their jobs.
The company’s sales reps, for example, can use the RingCentral app to make and take business calls from their laptops or even their own smartphones. And using RingCentral’s integration with Salesforce, these reps can even record and then save these calls in their Salesforce account for record-keeping and review later.
“We’re also using RingCentral Meetings every day to run video calls,” Stacia explains. “That’s been great both for internal team collaboration and also for helping us stay connected to our clients.”
The company used to subscribe to a separate online faxing service, which charged them every month for each line. “Now—just like all of the other communications services we’re using every day—it’s included with RingCentral.”