Lead developer and technology manager Daniel Heighton says Construction Monitor picked RingCentral based on its core features, but the API is a bonus. “We have the programming expertise, and now we’re able to leverage it,” he said.
Although he could retrieve the same data through RingCentral’s administration tools, API access allows him to present just the data sales management needs to see, in the format that they want to see it. For example, they don’t want to see all the call data, just the calls made by the sales staff, Heighton says. In addition, he gets the option of treating that data as an input into more comprehensive dashboards or reports.
Before Construction Monitor moved to RingCentral from another cloud phone service, Heighton produced a very similar report on call volume and duration, but not through an API. Instead, the sales manager had to download a spreadsheet and upload it into an application Heighton had created. The software matched extensions to the names of the sales representatives and graphed the results. “The sales manager liked having the data, but he didn’t like the work it took to get it,” Heighton says.
Heighton immediately saw the potential of the RingCentral API to provide him with much easier access to the same data. Construction Monitor became an early member of the beta program and one of the first to go live with an API application, in May 2015. “It’s one of two APIs I use that I’ve never had an issue with,” he says. A couple of other APIs he depends on, from other companies, “go down weekly,” he says. “RingCentral has never had an issue that I know of.”
The API itself is “very professional, with simple methods, and brings back very detailed data,” Heighton says. He processes that data within a custom application Construction Monitor uses to track customers and sales performance, then feeds it into another cloud application, Geckoboard’s dashboard software.
In addition to integrating the call data with sales data, Heighton wants to use Geckoboard’s data visualization capabilities to make the information easier to understand at a glance—something he has done to a greater extent with other company performance reports.
The next API function he wants to explore is SMS text messaging. Construction Monitor could then notify customers on their phones, rather than via email, when it has new leads for them. There are other cloud services for texting, but Heighton sees the advantage of texting as part of an integrated platform. That means the messages would come from a Construction Monitor phone number that customers could easily text back or call back. Most other bulk text messaging services send out messages from a 5-digit code rather than a phone number, he noted.
With RingCentral, “you get a unified front you can present to your customer,” he says.
