Fuel Company
Top Distributor of Petroleum Products Is Using RingCentral to Fuel its Growth
I don’t think any of us, or our customers, expected the calls would sound so darn good.
Project Manager
Project Manager
Ever wonder how the fuel at your local gas station gets there? And why every time you pull up to the pump, you have full confidence that the station will have enough to fill your tank?
That fuel doesn’t magically appear. It’s a complex process involving wholesale fueling stations, customer service agents taking orders, truck drivers delivering fuel, and dispatch teams guiding those drivers along their routes—often through the middle of the night.
One of the most successful businesses in the wholesale fuel industry is a RingCentral customer. In business for decades, this company delivers to thousands of organizations across the US including gas stations, farms, trucking companies, construction firms, and government agencies.
One of the most successful businesses in the wholesale fuel industry is a RingCentral customer. In business for decades, this company delivers to thousands of organizations across the US including gas stations, farms, trucking companies, construction firms, and government agencies.
In fact, the company has become one of the nation’s largest distributors of gasoline, diesel fuel, alternative fuels, and other petroleum products. Every day the organization quite literally helps to fuel our economy.
And because it’s doing work that’s so important to the operations of so many other businesses, the company couldn’t continue with its aging phone system.
A legacy phone system running on empty
Taking fuel orders and delivering to customers at all hours of the day, seven days a week, the organization needs its customer service agents and dispatch teams to be accessible 24/7.
The company also needs a high-quality phone infrastructure, one that works reliably and that can quickly and easily scale to keep up with the organization’s rapid growth. But its previous on-prem phone system… well, it did neither of those things.
It was unreliable, dropping calls inexplicably and providing call quality that was so bad that customers noticed. It also took forever to do little things—like adding a person to the system.
With the old phone system, it was difficult not only to bring new offices online but also to make even small changes, like adding users.
Chief Information Officer
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Energy
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Adding fuel to the fire
The problem became even more pronounced recently, when the company merged with one of its largest competitors. That acquisition added eight new offices and more than 100 employees to the organization.
It also added a different legacy phone system—one that had challenges of its own. “Now we had two on-prem phone platforms—neither one was easy to use, and they were basically incompatible with each other,” explains the company’s Chief Information Officer.
Phone calls and video calls—in the same app
With RingCentral, the company found the unified communications platform it needed to reliably serve both the company’s hundreds of geographically distributed employees and its thousands of fuel-thirsty customers.
The company’s field sales reps can now take and make calls—and even join online meetings from anywhere using the RingCentral app. And because everyone is on the same phone platform, it’s easy for an employee to quickly locate and call a colleague.
The organization’s help desk and customer service managers are also using RingCentral’s Live Reports feature to improve accountability among agents and gain greater visibility into its operations.
As the CIO explains: “We have wall-mounted TVs displaying in real-time who’s taking calls, who’s on break, and how many calls each agent takes. That transparency has meant a big boost to productivity.”
As the CIO explains: “We have wall-mounted TVs displaying in real-time who’s taking calls, who’s on break, and how many calls each agent takes. That transparency has meant a big boost to productivity.”
Also, because its staff is distributed across dozens of locations, the company’s employees often meet with each other through video conference calls. Before, when they didn’t have a single solution shared by the entire organization, these video meetings used to be plagued by incompatibilities and other tech issues.
Now, every employee is on RingCentral Meetings—which is embedded into other tools like their phone system. “We can start meetings from anywhere, and it’s easy for everyone to join. That’s a huge win for us,” the CIO explains.
Running smoothly, even in the face of a disaster
To really understand why it’s so important to have a phone system that works anywhere, check out this story the CIO told us. A power outage recently struck the company’s headquarters.
It was early on a weekday evening, which meant the local utility wasn’t able to restore power until 6am the next morning. That might not be a catastrophe for a typical office or a retail store.
But the organization’s fleet of trucks picks up and delivers fuel 24/7, so the company needs its dispatch agents located at HQ available to those drivers by phone throughout the night.
If this had happened while the company still had its on-prem phone system, those dispatchers would’ve been unable to use their business phones all night—and unreachable by their drivers. It probably would have resulted in a scramble of dispatchers calling each driver to give out their personal cell phone numbers—or their home phone numbers if they went home to work their shifts.
But with RingCentral, those dispatchers just hopped in their cars, drove to a nearby office, and plugged their phones in. Just like that, they had their business lines operating at a new location—with no interruption in coverage for the company’s late-night delivery drivers.
But with RingCentral, those dispatchers just hopped in their cars, drove to a nearby office, and plugged their phones in. Just like that, they had their business lines operating at a new location—with no interruption in coverage for the company’s late-night delivery drivers.
A surprise benefit
One characteristic of the business’s legacy system that everyone had gotten used to was poor call quality. The sound on the typical phone call was so bad, so consistently, even customers had stopped commenting on it.