PGA
RingCentral Helps PGA Promote the Game of Golf
Industry
Consumer Goods
Hq
Palm Beach
Gardens, FL
Gardens, FL
Year founded
1916
Employees
500
Industry
Consumer Goods
Hq
Palm Beach Gardens, FL
Year founded
1916
Employees
500
RingCentral hit all the marks of what we were looking for, and it worked better than the others in our environment. The price point was where we wanted it to be as well.
Laurie French
Director of Technology Operations, PGA
100%
Calls viewed and analyzed
50%
Increase in support team capacity
An important part of the PGA of America’s mission is to grow interest and participation in the game of golf. The organization achieves this in a variety ways. In addition to conducting more than 30 tournaments each year, PGA operates a headquarters, 41 section offices across the US, an educational center where members and apprentices receive training, a golf learning center for the public, a golf museum, a philanthropic arm (PGA Foundation), and four of its own golf courses.
Time to consolidate and add functionality
Previously, an aging, on-prem PBX provided the phone service for the 200 staff members at PGA headquarters. A different PBX served the 35 employees of the educational center. The smaller PGA facilities, along with temporary events such as tournaments, acquired their own phone services from local providers.
In 2014, Laurie French, PGA’s director of technology operations, decided to upgrade and consolidate phone service across the organization. One of the biggest improvements she wanted to make was to gain redundancy. “Whenever we had any type of windstorm event and lost electricity, it was as if we didn’t exist,” French explains. “People who called heard dead air—not even a message.”
She also wanted to bring newer communications functionality such as video and audio conferencing to more people within the organization. “We had been using an audio conferencing service that people dialed in to, but it was too expensive,” French recalls. Another important requirement was to provide better communications tools for employees who traveled extensively, who make up approximately 60% of the staff.
RingCentral hit all the marks at the right price
After spending approximately a year evaluating and testing four unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions, PGA chose RingCentral. “RingCentral hit all the marks of what we were looking for, and it worked better than the others in our environment,” says French. “The price point was where we wanted it to be as well.”
She estimates that the organization has reduced its communications costs by 25% since deploying RingCentral. Immediate savings came from getting rid of the headquarters’ 25 fax machines and dedicated communication lines. Another came from replacing the expensive audio conferencing service of the past with RingCentral MVP™. Retiring the two PBXs saved even more. Further savings may yet be possible as French converts more of the section offices, golf courses, and temporary sites over to RingCentral.
We’re building out a platform based Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and the coming RingCentral integration with Dynamics is something we could benefit from.
Laurie French
Director of Technology Operations, PGA
More functionality and a path for the future
RingCentral allowed French to meet her goal of delivering more communications functionality to the PGA staff. The mobile employees—including the executive team, the people who put on the championships, the marketing and communications groups, and the business development team—now work more efficiently on the road. “RingCentral has definitely improved their ability to stay connected and on top of what’s happening in the office,” says French. “They no longer have to go to separate places to check email, check voicemail on their cell phones, check voicemail on their desk phones, find a physical fax machine, and so on,” she explains “All of that is available on their mobile phones with RingCentral.” All users love the timesaving capability of seeing their voice messages in email. “According to user feedback, that’s the feature that scored the highest,” French adds.
As director of technology operations, French values RingCentral’s commitment to integrating its communications functionality with other technology PGA uses now, or will use in the future. A good example is RingCentral’s support for a database initiative aimed at enhancing communication with the golf community. “We’re building out a platform based Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM and the coming RingCentral integration with Dynamics is something we could benefit from,” she says.
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