Porch
RingCentral Provides a Reliable, Integrated Platform for Sales and Service Call Centers
Industry
High Tech
Hq
Seattle, WA
Year founded
2013
Employees
Fewer than 50
employees
employees
Industry
High Tech
Hq
Seattle, WA
Year founded
2013
Employees
Fewer than 50
employees
employees
It made sense to go with RingCentral because the administrative capabilities are there and no development is required.
Ankur Pradhan
Senior Salesforce Developer, Porch
There is a universal need for homeowners to take care of and realize the potential of their homes. Wherever and whenever needed, Porch is conveniently accessible through its website, chat, SMS, and partners such as Lowe’s Home Improvement, Wayfair, Williams-Sonoma, and more.
Porch is a partner to help maintain, care for, and improve the value of a home. For small jobs, clients can simply book a project with vetted Porch professionals at competitive fixed rates 20% below market. Customers only pay once the job is completed. For larger projects, homeowners are connected with professionals from Porch’s network of over 300K national and local providers.
There is a huge market opportunity for home services to move online. However, an estimated 90% of demand is still offline. The satisfaction of a home services experience is still largely reliant on a successful offline in-home experience. Therefore, Porch’s human operations teams are critical components of its product offering, supporting both homeowners and professionals.
Porch’s sales and service teams are constantly on the phone with customers and prospects, using Salesforce® CRM to track and manage the interactions. Initially, Porch cobbled together a physical PBX and a cloud-based call center solution (from different vendors), and then did the development work to integrate those with its CRM software.
“It was a very complex situation,” explains Ankur Pradhan, Senior Salesforce Developer at Porch. “The call center system was dropping calls, and sometimes the integration with the PBX and call center failed. There was a lot of churn.”
RingCentral provides an integrated platform for communications and call centers
Pradhan decided to address those shortcomings by replacing the separate PBX and call center solutions with a single integrated cloud communications platform. When he saw a demo of RingCentral cloud communications and its seamless integration with RingCentral Contact Center, he was interested. When he learned that RingCentral had already integrated Contact Center with Salesforce CRM, he was sold. The integration includes an integrated dialer, meaning employees could make calls directly from the CRM system. A related advantage to going with RingCentral was the fact that Contact Center comes with built-in voice response (IVR) functionality. “Other products we looked at didn’t have that. By going with Contact Center, we wouldn’t have to spend development time and money on that,” he adds.
RingCentral offered another key advantage that Sean Parson, Salesforce Administrator at Porch, was happy to see: the extensive administrative functionality available out of the box. “It made sense to go with RingCentral because the administrative capabilities are there and no development is required,” he says. “And this is me, as a developer saying this, because the nature of the development is that it’s always expensive.”
More functionality and greater stability at a lower cost
Porch uses all of the RingCentral endpoints: desk phones (by the sales and support teams), softphones (by the homeowner support team), and the RingCentral Mobile® app (by their field sales team). The leadership team uses RingCentral MVP™ for web conferencing, and Porch plans to expand the use of RingCentral MVP more broadly in the future.
All of the teams except the one in the field use RingCentral Contact Center. A key benefit of Contact Center is that it allows Porch to offer services that are appropriate to the needs of its different users. For example, contractors and other professionals who utilize the Porch service spend a great deal of time at customer sites and are heavily dependent on their call phones for communications. Porch provides its professionals with two-way SMS communications to help them coordinate and schedule their work in a way that fits their work style.
Porch takes advantage of RingCentral’s call-back feature to improve customers’ hold times. When hold times are long, callers have the option to leave a call-back number, hold their place in line, and have the system call when an agent is available—options that have greatly improved customer satisfaction.
RingCentral gives Porch the seamlessly integrated communications, call center, and CRM solution Pradhan was searching for, at a cost that is 25% less than what the company was previously paying; and yet the company now has much more functionality, including omnichannel contact center, web conferencing with RingCentral MVP, and the RingCentral Mobile app.
The company also gets support it can count on. “RingCentral’s support after the sale is very good. Our sales manager is always available and reaching out to us,” says Parson.
Other products we looked at didn’t have contact center with built-in voice response (IVR) functionality. By going with [RingCentral] Contact Center, we wouldn’t have to spend development time and money on that.
Ankur Pradhan
Senior Salesforce Developer, Porch
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