Giordano’s

With RingCentral’s Cloud Phone System, Giordano’s Delivers a Customer Experience as Good as Its Pizza
Giordanos logo
Because the RingCentral Admin Portal lets us do so much and is so easy to use, I can now easily set up the communication needs for the new restaurant in minutes. I don’t have to do complicated legacy system configurations and also call the telecom carrier and wait for days for all of this to be provisioned.

Michael Stano

Vice President of IT, Giordano’s

When a restaurant makes phenomenal pizza, its phones ring constantly. That’s why for Giordano’s—called “Chicago’s Best Pizza” by NBC, CBS Chicago, the New York Times, and countless other media outlets and restaurant guides—quality customer communications is crucial to the company’s operations.

Unfortunately, the multiple on-premises legacy phone systems Giordano’s had deployed across its growing network of restaurants across the US were delivering poor customer experience. The reason for the poor experience was that the systems were unreliable, difficult to scale, and lacked the advanced call routing the company needed to manage overflow during high call volume periods. So the IT team began looking for a better solution that would support voice, video, and team messaging capabilities—and the only one with all of the services they needed was the RingEX™ solution.

The popular pizza chain couldn’t settle for anything less than what would deliver outstanding customer experience

“Our business relies heavily on customer phone calls for carryout orders,” explains Michael Stano, Vice President of IT for Giordano’s. “With our previous phone system, we were constantly having problems with busy signals, and the system didn’t give us an efficient way to deal with high volumes of call traffic, such as letting us immediately reroute overflow calls to a less busy location or call center.”

“These challenges got more pronounced every time we added a new restaurant, and we’ve been expanding rapidly across the country,” Stano continues. “It got to the point where a customer calling in during a busy time or to a popular location could be waiting on hold for 20 minutes. That wasn’t a customer experience we were satisfied with.”

“At the same time,” Stano explains, “the limitations of our legacy communication system also did not provide video meeting capabilities that our executives needed to communicate with our restaurant teams around the country.”

Migrating to RingCentral solved several problems simultaneously

“Because the RingCentral Admin Portal lets us do so much and is so easy to use, I can now easily set up the communication needs for the new restaurant in minutes. I don’t have to do complicated legacy system configurations and also call the telecom carrier and wait for days for all of this to be provisioned. I can now just log in from anywhere and do it all from the RingCentral Admin Portal: procure phone numbers for the new location, order phones, get them activated, and set up all of the call instructions for that restaurant using a template we created in RingCentral. I can’t tell you how much time, cost, and aggravation this saves our IT team.”

“We’re also getting a lot of value from RingCentral Meetings,” Stano explains. “We have dozens of restaurants around the US, so we use video meetings several times a week to meet with our various locations. We used other online meeting solutions in the past, but those were difficult to use and unpredictable, and we had to pay license fees for each seat in addition to what we were paying for the legacy phone system. Now that voice, video, and team messaging capabilities are all included with the RingEX solution, it’s easier to use and more cost effective than the multiple older systems we were using.”

“The feedback we’ve gotten from our staff about RingCentral video meetings, like the feedback we get about the customer experience when calling our restaurants, has been extremely positive.”

I can now just log in from anywhere and do it all from the RingCentral Admin Portal: procure phone numbers for the new location, order phones, get them activated, and set up all of the call instructions for that restaurant using a template we created in RingCentral. I can’t tell you how much time, cost, and aggravation this saves our IT team.

Michael Stano

Vice President of IT, Giordano’s
INDUSTRY
Food and Beverage
HQ
Chicago, IL
YEAR FOUNDED
1974
EMPLOYEES
200+

A surprise benefit: helping management focus on the big picture

“You wouldn’t think a cloud communications platform, no matter how good, would make that much of a difference to a business. But our management team has been able to spend less time worrying about hardware and technology vendors because RingCentral has made our communications run so much more smoothly and effectively. In fact, RingCentral has enabled our senior leadership team to focus on more forward-looking and important business initiatives that help us grow our business and provide great customer experience.”