First Bank
Multibillion-Dollar Bank Uses RingCentral to Upgrade Customer Service and Employee Communications Across More than 100 Branches
RingCentral rollout is already saving us 30% on our overall phone system costs.
Bala Nibhanupudi
Chief Information Officer, First Bank
Since its founding 100 years ago as a small neighborhood bank primarily for farmers, First Bank has grown into a multibillion-dollar institution offering a full suite of financial and wealth management services to individuals and businesses across the country. The company has more than 100 locations, over a thousand employees, and more than a dozen different call centers to serve customers.
So, when First Bank set a goal in 2016 of updating its core systems—including migrating its communications from a legacy PBX to a cloud-based system—the technical team took its time investigating the various offerings on the market. This was going to represent major changes in workflow and functionality for hundreds of employees, and a new experience for customers as well, and they didn’t want to select anything less than the best.
INDUSTRY
Financial Services
HQ
St. Louis, MO
YEAR FOUNDED
1906
EMPLOYEES
1,000+
A six-month analysis of UCaaS providers leads to RingCentral
“We investigated all of the leading unified-communications-as-a-service players on the market before selecting RingCentral,” says Bala Nibhanupudi, First Bank’s Chief Information Officer.
“With each of the other providers, we found something (or more than one thing) lacking. One of the factors that drew us to RingCentral was that it had such a wide range of services on a single platform. It offered not only softphone functionality, allowing our call center employees to take customer calls from their computers, desk phones, or mobile phones but also a full suite of workforce optimization tools like quality management and speech analytics as well as a unified messaging and collaboration workspace for our team.”
Deploying RingCentral was extremely smooth
Another key factor that led First Bank to RingCentral was the availability of RingCentral Professional Services™ to help the company roll out the new system across its many locations.
“That hands-on help from the RingCentral Professional Services team was a big deal for us,” Nibhanupudi explains, “because this was going to be a large, complex undertaking involving many vendors and deployment across 100 plus branches. Also, the technical work involved in the migration was going to be tricky because our infrastructure was old and built on many disparate systems.
We were running everything on a PBX and call center software, which itself was comprised of multiple systems.”
“RingCentral Professional Services has been doing an awesome job of helping us make this rollout smooth and getting our team up and running very quickly,” says Nibhanupudi. “Throughout phase 1 of our migration, they have been on-site at our locations helping to set up the new systems, port over existing phone numbers, and coordinating with our other vendors, and even helping train our team members on using the new system.”
RingCentral Professional Services has been doing an awesome job of helping us make this rollout smooth and getting our team up and running very quickly.
Bala Nibhanupudi
Chief Information Officer, First Bank
Phase 1 of First Bank’s rollout of RingCentral is already showing significant benefits
First Bank is now midway through phase 1 of its planned two-phase company deployment of a full suite of RingCentral’s UCaaS services including RingEX™, RingCentral Contact Center™, Glip®, and other applications. “We’re already seeing a big return on our investment in RingCentral,” says Nibhanupudi.
“We’ve been able to replace our PBX and the six or seven servers we were maintaining to run our previous call center infrastructure with a lightweight, cloud-based system. Even factoring in the cost of RingCentral’s desktop VoIP phones that we’ve set up, the RingCentral rollout is already saving us 30% on our overall phone system costs.”
“Also, as soon as we replaced our employees’ legacy phones with RingCentral, we began to see value immediately. Our team was able to do a lot more with RingCentral’s softphone capability than they’d ever been able to do with our legacy phones. And this was before we fully implemented the complete RingCentral solution in the way we plan to in the next phase—which will create a unified communications experience for our team to call, meet, message, and collaborate from anywhere using any device. Bottom line for us: RingCentral is already making good on its promise of improving our communications, and we anticipate it will continue delivering even more value as we roll out more services.”