Queensland Childcare Services

Queensland Childcare Services saving 50-60% on telco costs with RingCentral
Queensland Childcare Centre logo
Region
Asia Pacific
Company size
400–4,999
Industry
Education
Products used
Business Communications logo
Now with RingCentral we can see remotely if an endpoint is green or red; if it’s red, we can find out what’s happening with that phone. With RingCentral, I don’t have to go on-site; I can do most things remotely. It’s very convenient.

Randee Tablizo

IT Manager, Queensland Childcare Services
Queensland Childcare Services (QCCS) is a privately owned and operated early childhood education institution with 24 centres in southeast Queensland. Established in 1991, QCCS is one of Australia’s leading providers of high quality, individualised care and education of young children. QCCS is at the forefront of industry developments and trends, offering an array of additional services for families and their children including interactive smart boards, individual online child portfolios, and fresh, nutritious meals and eWater sanitisers at all its centres to ensure a healthy learning environment for children by using an organic certified solution for disinfecting and cleaning.
Voice connections for QCCS are critical for ease and certainty of contact between each of its centres and the families of the children under their care and responsibility. For telephony, QCCS had been using a hosted VoIP service, which they had transferred over to a local cloud PBX solution.
However, this solution only provided basic telephony features, there was no visibility on the status of endpoints or connections, poor voice quality and technical support, and QCCS’s IT team had to travel to each centre for any changes or troubleshooting.

Take a quick tour of RingCentral

With its three-year telephony contract approaching expiry, QCCS decided to move to RingCentral’s RingEX unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform.
Overall cost and the 99.999% availability of the RingCentral UCaaS platform were deciding factors. Since deployment, RingCentral is saving QCCS 50-60% on its annual telecommunications costs and the platform has been very reliable.
Centralised visibility and remote management were also critical factors in QCCS’s decision to move to RingCentral UCaaS.
“With the old system, we couldn’t see whether a handset has just been disconnected, whether it’s been activated, or if it's online or offline.  It was only when we switched to RingCentral and had to return our old phones that we discovered a lot missing. Now with RingCentral we can see remotely if an endpoint is green or red; if it’s red, we can find out what’s happening with that phone. With RingCentral, I don’t have to go on-site; I can do most things remotely. It’s very convenient,” said Randee Tablizo, IT Manager, Queensland Childcare Services.
~55%
monthly telephony cost savings
Central
visibility and reporting, ability to manage dispersed locations remotely
Reliable
and high-quality voice communications
That includes troubleshooting: QCCS is able to use the RingCentral Admin Portal to determine the cause of any connectivity issues. In one instance, the issue was quickly diagnosed as poor mobile phone reception.
“The RingCentral Admin Portal is very impressive. I can see everything. I can tell the user that it’s not you or our system causing the problem – it’s your mobile reception,” said Tablizo.
QCCS staged the RingCentral deployment in groups, based on each centre’s location, shipping all the new handsets to head office for configuration.
Each centre has its own number, which goes to the centre’s director, then to the assistant director if the call isn’t picked up. From there, calls can be transferred to each room. In total, QCCS has rolled out 350 handsets to head office and all the centres, with each centre connected via standard internet broadband connection. Staff in the centres and head office predominantly use handsets, while staff travelling between centres or working remotely are using the RingCentral mobile app.
With RingCentral it’s so easy to add a new phone compared to the other system we had. If we had to request a new phone for a centre, it would take a week or two before we could get the phone and make it work. With RingCentral, after deployment we requested two additional phones and they arrived the following day, and we sent them straight to the centre.
Randee Tablizo
IT Manager, Queensland Childcare Services
Porting was also straightforward. The date was set for the cutover and all QCCS’s existing numbers were retained when the RingCentral system went live. That was critical because so many families would have been affected by any number changes, and QCCS would have had to go to considerable cost and effort to update all of its signage and collateral.

Plans to introduce video meetings

After experiencing problems with its current videoconference system, QCCS has been successfully trialling RingCentral Video as the replacement solution. QCCS is a regular user of video, with daily update meetings for key staff. QCCS is also considering the use of video in the future for its subsidiary, the Australian Institute of Early Childhood Studies (AIECS) - the first online early childhood college in Australia.
“It looks like we are here to stay with RingCentral,” said Tablizo.