MedCare

MedCare Cuts Call Wait Times 40% with RingCentral

Region

Americas

Company size

100–399

Industry

Healthcare

MedCareEquipment.com

Products used

40%

reduction in average call wait times with RingCentral Contact Center

92%

time saved on call reviews and agent coaching since deploying AI Conversation Expert

20%

faster at resolving customer issues and closing deals is expected once AI Conversation Expert is deployed

Here’s the best way I can sum up how thrilled we’ve been with RingCentral—in terms of functionality, flexibility, cost-savings, uptime, everything. As our contract was ending, the team at RingCentral sent me a notice about renewing, and they suggested a new term of 2 years. I responded, ‘Can we do 5 years instead?’

Zac Shannon

IT Manager

A leading medical equipment provider for four decades

Whether they’re receiving treatment in a hospital or recovering at home from an acute health event, patients need the right medical equipment at the right time. And for the medical community across Western Pennsylvania—general physicians, hospital staff, and other caregivers—MedCare Equipment Company has become the go-to resource for the durable and home medical equipment they need for their patients.

Whether they need wheelchairs, beds, continuous glucose monitors, PAP devices for sleep apnea, or a wide range of other solutions, medical providers in the region turn to the experts at MedCare more than any other equipment company. Since 1985, in fact, MedCare has supplied the mission-critical equipment to help more than one million patients on their healthcare journey.

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Looking for a phone system to keep pace with the company’s growth

MedCare moved from its on-prem phone system to a cloud communications solution several years ago to help the company manage its rapid growth. But IT Manager Zac Shannon explains that the new cloud system fell far short of MedCare’s needs.

“It was a nightmare,” Zac says. “We had regular outages, which was a particular challenge because we offer 24-hour live customer support, and our small HelpDesk team was receiving downtime tickets at all hours.”

The system’s other shortcomings, Zac notes, included minimal reporting and analytics, the need to maintain physical desk phones for all employees, and a lack of seamlessly integrated communication services the company also needed, such as live chat and SMS.

But the biggest operational challenge, the shortcoming that sent Zac’s team searching for a new solution, was that they couldn’t make needed administrative adjustments to their phone system on the fly.

If we wanted to make any change to the old system, like create a call queue or buy a new number, we had to submit a request to the vendor. They took at least five-to-seven business days to get it done. Now that we have RingCentral, I can do all of these things myself in under an hour.

Zac Shannon

IT Manager

Choosing RingCentral for its suite of integrated solutions

A key reason Zac’s team chose RingCentral was its ability to address the company’s major telephony needs all with a single platform. For example, Zac explains that rolling the RingEX as the company’s cloud phone solution helped free up MedCare’s employees from their desks and improved the experience for callers.

“With RingEX, we were able to make our phone menus much more intuitive and guide customers and other callers more quickly to the right people.”

As MedCare also found, selecting RingCentral also meant the company could seamlessly integrate other mission-critical IT communications services, including RingCentral AI Conversation Expert (ACE) and RingCentral Contact Center.

Streamlining and improving agent coaching with AI

As Zac explains, deploying ACE is delivering significant operational improvements, particularly in terms of coaching and training customer support agents.

“We were recording our customer support calls with the old system, but from a coaching standpoint our managers had to listen to the entire call to get the full story. Now that we’re using ACE, we’re getting all calls automatically analyzed and summarized. And from what we’ve seen, ACE is spot-on in its analysis and call highlights—good and bad.”

In fact, Zac adds, the AI Conversation Expert coaching and training capability is saving the customer support department an average of roughly five hours per manager and agent each week. The supervisors no longer need to spend so much time manually reviewing calls, and agents don’t need to have as many one-on-one meetings to discuss what’s working and what isn’t on these calls.

For a manager to review an agent’s full call and summarize their findings, it used to take about 25 minutes. With ACE, we can now review an AI-generated analysis in two minutes. That’s a time savings of 92%—not including the time saved by letting our agents see their own automated call reviews on the platform rather than having to meet with their manager.

Zac Shannon

IT Manager

In addition to saving time, Zac points out, ACE also helps the customer support team uncover valuable new business intelligence.

“One thing ACE is spotting for us with its sentiment analysis—and we never even thought to look for this—is uncertainty. When an agent comes across as unsure about the guidance they’re giving to a patient, that can undermine the patient’s confidence as well. Now that we’re getting alerted to these moments of uncertainty on calls, we know where and on which topics to give our agents additional training or product knowledge.”

Achieving a 40% reduction in wait times

When they rolled out RingCentral Contact Center, MedCare’s customer support team found several ways to improve their workflows and the caller experience. One such improvement, Zac explains, was the ability to consolidate solutions.

“Because the old system provided phone service only, we used third-party apps to support our customers with chat and SMS. And if a customer mistakenly faxed an order to our main number instead of our fax, we’d never know we missed it. Now everything is integrated with RingCentral, which means our agents can handle voice and chat inquiries in the same queue, and we have full visibility and reporting into what’s happening across all communications.”

Additionally, because RingCentral Contact Center makes it so easy to adjust call queues, routing instructions, and other important workflows, Zac points out that the customer support team has been able to dramatically improve their callers’ average wait times.

Thanks to the visibility we’ve gained with RingCentral analytics, and being able to quickly adjust our call flow when traffic gets heavy for a certain queue or region, we’ve been able to bring down our average wait times by 40%. Considering how important these calls can be for our patients, that’s extremely gratifying to our team.

Zac Shannon

IT Manager

Another major benefit has been giving the entire customer support team the peace of mind, knowing they have a highly reliable phone system and no longer need to worry about being inaccessible to patients and other customers when they need them.

RingEX and RingCentral Contact Center have given us a lot of capabilities we didn’t have with our previous solutions. But the fundamental benefit for us, and the biggest difference from our old service, is that we have complete confidence in our phone system. In the three years since we rolled out RingCentral, we’ve had less than two total hours of downtime.

Zac Shannon

IT Manager

Looking ahead: Increasing value with RingCX and RingCentral features

Finally, Zac explains, MedCare is looking ahead to improving more workflows across the company using various tools on the RingCentral platform.

The customer support team is also looking forward to adding more contact center functionality with RingCX and ACE developed specifically for that solution. Based on the quantifiable improvements they’ve already experienced with ACE, Zac expects that deploying more RingCentral functionality will continue adding tremendous value to their business.

MedCare’s sales team is also planning to use the RingCentral for Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration, for example, to be able to make and receive customer calls right from their CRM.

Based on what we’re getting in terms of new insights and visibility, I’m confident that deploying AI Conversation Expert will help us both resolve customer issues and close new deals at least 20% faster.

Zac Shannon

IT Manager

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