NCI Information Systems
RingCentral Engage Helped This Top Government Contractor Improve its Customer Service—and Cut Telecom Costs
After replacing our legacy phone system with RingCentral, we’ve gotten our telecom costs way down.
Vasili Ikonomidis
Chief Information Officer
When U.S. government agencies need modern, secure technology solutions for their most complex missions, they often turn to NCI Information Systems. Indeed, in 2020 and 2021, NCI has achieved significant growth, with the award of several contracts to help modernize federal IT systems leveraging NCI’s Empower™ Artificial-Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) platform.
But with business growth often comes growing pains. In fact, this provider of cutting-edge AI technologies needed to upgrade one its own infrastructure components: the company’s phone system.
INDUSTRY
Information
Technology Services,
Artificial Intelligence
HQ
Reston, VA
YEAR FOUNDED
1989
EMPLOYEES
1,000+
Addressing disjointed telecom services
Like many businesses that scale rapidly to meet demand, NCI built out its IT infrastructure organically, on an as-needed basis. When the company opened offices in a new location, its management teams were focused on hiring the right people and serving clients—not on which phone system to deploy.
But as NCI CIO Vasili Ikonomidis explained, this led to technical challenges when it came to the company’s communications environment. “Eventually we found ourselves with different levels of service, from different vendors, all over the country,” he said.
Ikonomidis pointed out that the company’s telephony infrastructure was built around an on-premises system that his team was managing at headquarters in Reston, Virginia. He notes that this created two operational challenges. The first was a lack of reliability and functionality.
“The on-premises system needed a lot of maintenance,” he said. “We sometimes had outages, and it took a lot of work making even minor adjustments.”
A second problem, he explained, was cost. “We had no centralized telephony invoicing, because we were paying so many different bills every month for phone, internet, faxing, and other services.”
When they investigated the company’s telephony infrastructure closely, Ikonomidis and his team knew they’d need to move to a cloud solution. For the interim period, though, they looked for a short-term fix to keep their legacy system functional. But that experience further underscored the urgency to find a more modern, scalable cloud solution.
“It was definitely time to move on, he said.”
Unifying, streamlining, and improving telephony operations
With RingCentral, NCI found the scalable, flexible communications solution they were looking for. Ikonomidis and his team were able to consolidate the company’s decentralized phone services and billing arrangements across the country into a single solution from one provider. But that was only the beginning of the operational improvements.
“From an internal communications standpoint, RingCentral created many efficiencies,” he said. “Now all of our employees have one communications app on their computers and smartphones that gives them access anywhere to their office phone number, video conferencing, online faxing, and team messaging.”
Another operational improvement was being able to host online meetings for as many people as the company needed. As Ikonomidis explained:
With our other conferencing app, we’d have call-quality problems if we had too many people join. RingCentral Video has worked well because we’re able to invite as many people as we want to these calls, and we haven’t had capacity or quality issues.
Vasili Ikonomidis
Chief Information Officer
And while NCI’s call center team was facing challenges with their legacy phone system, the team now operates more efficiently with RingCentral Contact Center and the RingCentral Engage customer-service platform. Ikonomidis noted that in addition to solving the team’s call-quality and uptime challenges, these RingCentral solutions have given the company’s support agents a number of efficiency- and productivity-boosting tools.
With RingCentral Engage, our agents now have key capabilities like automated outbound dialing and screen popups showing them the relevant details about the next company they’re calling.
Vasili Ikonomidis
Chief Information Officer
Anticipating more operational improvements with RingCentral
Over the last few months, NCI leveraged RingCentral’s unified cloud platform to improve operations, and now Ikonomidis and his team are looking into other tools and integrations available in the system.
“We’re working on integrating RingCentral’s one-click dialer with our lead-tracking platform, ServiceNow, to increase efficiencies for our business development team,” he said. “We’re also planning to use RingCentral’s APIs to add functionality—including AI capability—to make our automated outbound dialing more efficient.”
He added: “We’re looking forward to exploring more ways to improve our operations through the RingCentral investment.”