While the construction of the zoo school was the impetus for the zoo to evaluate UCaaS solutions, the ease of use and performance of RingCentral Phone™ and RingEX™ quickly won over Brian Carter, VP of Marketing. The zoo’s Sales team members are out of the office nearly as much as they are in, and a mobile solution enabling them to take and make phone calls on the go was a real necessity. Especially as a non-profit, the zoo can’t afford for its sales team to miss any donor calls.
Carter was looking for a great set of tools that could have his team accessible to clients wherever they went and allow them to collaborate across platforms. He finds that RingCentral lies at the crossroads of two of his greatest passions: technology and tools that increase business efficiency. “I’m really pleased with what I’ve been able to use with RingCentral so far. You have a real champion in me,” he says.
The zoo had been using a VoIP platform, itself a replacement of a PBX, but there were a lot of issues with the rollout, “never mind the features and performance,” says Armando Escobedo, IT Manager. Now, to enable employees’ mobile connectivity, they set their phone presence to Away, routing those calls to direct inward dialing numbers (DIDs) on RingCentral Phone on their mobile devices. This enables staff members across the zoo to receive direct calls without missing a beat. “I really like all the phones having their own DID numbers; that opens up a lot of opportunity for us. The people at the hospital can receive direct calls from the labs, external vets, and X-ray techs they interface with daily,” says Escobedo. The animal hospital and business office are also users of RingCentral’s internet fax solution, so Escobedo doesn’t have to hunt down a third-party fax service, and users can send and receive faxes directly from their computers.
In particular, Escobedo values the ease of rollout and administration of RingCentral’s solutions. “When we went through the training and saw how much more modern and intuitive the administration side was, that’s when I started changing my mind,” he says. Escobedo sees the lower cost per user as built-in value of RingCentral: The phones arrive preconfigured, which saves IT staff time and hassle, and each unit comes with associated apps, options, and accessories included. “And with RingCentral, we have a consolidated bill, whereas the former vendor charged us for every add on,“ says Escobedo.