This was part of my thinking when we picked RingCentral, that it would be good to have some way of integrating apps to improve the workflow of our lead management and admissions process,” Brenner says. 'It’s worked well for us.'
Greg Brenner
CIO, Ross Education
For Ross Education CIO Greg Brenner, using the RingCentral platform APIs to get his phone system and customer relationship management systems working together continues a pattern of simplification. Part of the point of signing up for RingEX™ in the first place was to replace several cloud services with one—eliminating the need for the faxing and online meetings services he used to pay for separately. Now, CRM integration with RingCentral means recruiting and admissions staff members can get more of their work done through a single user interface.
“This was part of my thinking when we picked RingCentral, that it would be good to have some way of integrating apps to improve the workflow of our lead management and admissions process,” Brenner says. “It’s worked well for us.”
RingCentral integration means employees can click to call prospective students from within the CRM app. The software also checks the caller ID on incoming calls against its database and pops any matching records up on the screen of the staff member who takes the call.
Ross provides training on a variety of medical assistant specialties, as well as healthcare administration disciplines like medical billing and insurance claims processing. Headquartered in Flint, Michigan, it has 45 locations throughout Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, and West Virginia.
Personnel at all those locations and in all job functions use RingEX, but the greatest integration need was to make recruiting and admissions employees more productive.
INDUSTRY
Education
HQ
Clinton Township,
MI
YEAR FOUNDED
1971
EMPLOYEES
600+
Getting the CRM vendor on board
Ross Education recently switched from using Salesforce® to manage leads and applications from prospective students to a specialized CRM for education. CampusNexus is a cloud-hosted CRM from Campus Management Corp., which also makes the student information system Ross uses. Campus Management had not previously produced an integration with RingCentral, but got started on one at Brenner’s request. “I would be surprised if they did not start offering this to other customers,” he says.
Shashank Mishra, a senior developer at Campus Management who specializes in third-party integrations, says it took a little longer for him to get started with RingCentral than for some other telephony integrations, but that was mostly because RingCentral’s process for authenticating access was more thorough and secure. The other thing that impressed him was how straightforward the process of adding click-to-call interactivity turned out to be, requiring just a few lines of JavaScript. “The click-to-dial is better than with many providers,” he says.
The entire integration took a couple of months, or a little over 100 hours of labor, to develop and test. It went live in May 2017. Campus Management has not yet made RingCentral integration a standard part of its product, but meanwhile Mishra says he is showcasing the integration in discussions with other customers as an example of what is possible.
The payoff
For Ross Education, the RingCentral integration was part of a larger effort to streamline the entire admissions process, making a better impression on prospective students and signing up more of them. “It helps with training, too, to be using one system instead of two,” Brenner says.
Admissions is a process that involves lots of meetings and conference calls, as well as faxing and text messaging, Brenner says. RingCentral helps with all of that, and with the CRM integration the impact is even greater.
“Our goal was to get everything in a single pane of glass,” Brenner says. “Now we have better visibility into every step of the admissions process.”
Our goal was to get everything in a single pane of glass. Now we have better visibility into every step of the admissions process.
Greg Brenner
CIO, Ross Education