Cross Company
How Unified Communications Brought this Industrial Solutions Provider’s Own Operations into the 21st Century
No need to tie our team to a physical phone in the office, when we can use RingCentral and let them communicate wherever they are, on whatever device they have.
Nicholas Laws
IT Support Specialist, Cross
We rarely think about it, but life as we know it depends on the successful functioning of industries such as aerospace, energy, and chemicals. Many of those businesses depend on Cross Company.
From aerospace companies, to food and beverage firms, to medical device manufacturers, to semiconductor factories… essential organizations of all types rely on Cross Company’s products, services, and complete solutions.
But for a business selling cutting-edge solutions including IoT and advanced robotics, Cross Company’s own organization was operating with a very primitive and inflexible phone solution.
When phone service becomes the weak link
Disruption in business communications can be harmful to any company. But when service goes down for an organization like Cross Company, which supplies mission-critical solutions to key areas of society, the consequences can be far more serious.
A lack of reliability wasn’t the only challenge the old phone system created. Because the system operated on proprietary code and was extremely non-intuitive, administering it was time-consuming and tedious. Cross Company’s IT team found itself spending too much energy and resources dealing with phone issues.
And the company faced yet another challenge. Cross Company operates from dozens of locations across the US. These geographically distributed employees often need to collaborate on complex solutions for large-scale customer projects—i.e., developing a complete process control system for a city’s water treatment plant.
Aside from its inflexible and unreliable phone service, the company didn’t have any type of shared digital environment, such as online team chat or video conferencing, to enable much-needed virtual collaboration.
Just making a small change to the system — adding a user, updating a call-forwarding rule — required time, expertise, and lots of patience.
Nicholas Laws
IT Support Specialist, Cross
INDUSTRY
High Tech
HQ
Greensboro, NC
YEAR FOUNDED
1954
EMPLOYEES
500+
Cross finds their solution: a unified communications app
Now that Cross Company’s 500 employees all have RingCentral accounts, direct dial numbers, and unified app on their desktops and smartphones, the staff is communicating more effectively than ever.
“I’m seeing a lot of our employees on the RingCentral unified app all day long,” says IT Support Specialist Nicholas Laws. “They’re using the phone, the video conferencing, and the team messaging to have chats and share files.”
In fact, Cross Company has found this new technology is helping its staff provide even better service to customers. Sales reps, for example, can now be more responsive wherever they are, answering calls on their business lines from their laptops and mobile phones.
“It’s great that our outside reps can take a work call or join an audio conference while they’re away from the office,” says Nicholas. “That’s definitely improving our productivity.”
Nicholas also notes, employees are taking full advantage of RingCentral Video for virtual meetings with screen sharing. Because it’s so easy to schedule a video conference in the app and invite anyone just by sending them a meeting link, more Cross Company employees are using this method of communication with coworkers, customers, and vendors. And it’s working smoothly.
“Since we rolled it out, we haven’t had a single audio or video issue or Helpdesk ticket come in,” he says. “Our team just loves RingCentral Video.”
An essential service for an essential business
Cross Company continues to grow its organization, its geographical footprint, and its customer base. And because the company now has companywide, cloud-based communications, it has the technology to stay connected, accessible, and responsive even as its operations expand rapidly.
Which is good news—not only for Cross Company itself, but also for the many essential industries it serves, and for all of us, who depend on those industries every day.