The Minto Group

The award-winning real estate company uses RingEX to improve the caller experience, the responsiveness of its sales team, and the company’s overall efficiency.

Region

Americas

Company size

400–4,999

Industry

Real Estate

minto.com

Products used

Key integrations

day to migrate 300+ employees across 22 US locations, onto RingCentral

Minutes

for RingCentral to respond to questions and requests during implementation

Costs ⬇

after removing old hardware and canceling phone maintenance contracts

Between the wide-ranging improvements we’ve been able to make to so many areas of the business and the fact that switching to RingCentral is almost certainly saving us money, I’d say this migration has been a massive win for The Minto Group.

Matt Nutbrown

Service Desk Manager

Building better places to live for more than half a century

For decades, The Minto Group has been helping individuals and families find quality housing to meet their lifestyles. One of the most prolific and successful real estate companies in North America, Minto has built more than 100,000 homes throughout Canada and the Southeastern United States, and the company also provides rental housing at more than 1,100 apartment buildings in major Canadian cities.

A recognized leader in several areas of residential real estate development, Minto has earned many industry awards in the US and Canada. The US National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has recognized Minto with several awards for home design, including the “Best Single-Family Community Over 100 Homes” for Westlake, Florida. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA) has honored Minto with multiple awards for Housing Excellence. And for Minto’s active-adult communities, the NAHB named the company “55+ Builder of the Year.”

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A phone system that needed to be torn down and rebuilt

Matt Nutbrown, Service Desk Manager for The Minto Group’s Canadian operations, explains that for many years the company’s telecommunications ran on an aging, on-prem PBX system.

“It wasn’t particularly intuitive or efficient,” says Matt. “In fact, we needed a third-party consulting firm to help us manage our telecommunications, especially as our company grew and added locations across Canada and the US.”

Although it continued to meet Minto’s basic phone-service needs even as it aged, by 2023 the PBX had reached the end of its useful life. Minto’s IT team needed to decommission and replace the system – ideally with a modern cloud communications solution.

Anca Preda, The Minto Group’s Vice President of IT, explains that the company wanted to use the migration not only to find a more reliable telecom solution but also to solve as many of the operational issues created by the old phone system as possible.

We came up with a lot of requirements for our new phone system. It had to be easy to use, mobile, known for reliability, backed by outstanding customer support, and it had to integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. We investigated a lot of companies, and only RingCentral checked all the boxes.

Anca Preda

Vice President of IT

An incredibly smooth and painless implementation

As Anca explains, RingCentral’s project management and support teams worked closely with her team during a proof of concept. That experience, she says, had two lasting positive effects.

“Throughout the two-month proof of concept, we were able to confirm what we had been hearing in our research of cloud-communication vendors: RingCentral provides excellent support with knowledgeable and responsive professionals. The experience reinforced our assessment that RingCentral was the right choice from a customer support perspective.

The other positive effect of the proof of concept, Anca explains, was that it led to a disruption-free deployment. “Working with the RingCentral team pre-implementation helped our IT team become familiar with the system, and that made for a very smooth rollout.

The migration to RingCentral was so seamless, in fact, that Matt says he didn’t even experience the one series of hiccups he was all but certain would happen.

The one thing I dreaded about the implementation was the number porting, because that’s always a problem during a telecom switchover. But with our US migration, we just chose a day to flip the switch for all 22 locations – and without any issues, we successfully moved more than 300 employees’ numbers over to the RingCentral environment. Turns out, I didn’t even need to worry.

Matt Nutbrown

Service Desk Manager

RingCentral helps improve operations across the company

As Matt explains, giving Minto employees the ability to make and receive business calls on the RingCentral platform – whether using their desk phones, the softphone on their computers, the RingCentral mobile app, or even the RingCentral Embedded Dialer for Microsoft Teams – has led to substantial efficiencies and improved workflows across the organization.

“One of the biggest operational improvements we’ve seen is with RingCentral’s routing capabilities. Each Minto office has a Reception Desk team handling incoming calls to that office’s main number. We also have a team of Service Coordinators. Using RingCentral’s routing instructions, we can now automatically redirect calls to Service Coordinators when the Reception Desk staff are all on calls and need help. That’s helped us improve our client service.”

RingCentral has also helped Minto improve its sales operations, Matt explains.

“With the old phone system, our sales reps had a choice: Be at your desk to make and receive calls on your business number or give out your personal mobile number to have those calls outside the office. Now that they have the RingCentral app on their mobile phone, our reps can get work done and be responsive to clients wherever they are – and they never have to share their private cell number to do business.”

Gaining visibility and insight with RingCentral Live Reports

Matt notes that departments across the Minto organization can now use RingCentral Live Reports to gain valuable business intelligence.

“I created a report for our Service Desk Queue, for example, and I can now see how many calls are coming in during a given time and look for trends that I can use with staffing or even to uncover if maybe there’s a larger IT issue that needs addressing.”

Matt also describes a valuable piece of data he learned while monitoring the Live Reports, one that Minto has used to make another improvement to its client experience.

“During the implementation I used Live Reports to monitor how the intercom system works at our apartments,” Matt says. “Before RingCentral, when someone outside the building dialed the intercom, it would ring to a specific phone onsite. But that could obviously be a challenge if no one were sitting by the phone. So, I created a new rule with RingCentral to direct our intercom calls straight to the Reception Desk at the local Minto office. That’s also helping us provide better service to our rental tenants and their guests.”

Anticipating substantial cost savings

Although it wasn’t one of the main reasons Minto wanted to upgrade to RingCentral, Matt notes that the company expects the migration to result in a significant reduction in overall telecom costs.

“We know intuitively that we’re saving money in several ways,” explains Matt. “We no longer need to pay a third party to administer our phone system, because RingCentral is so intuitive that we can do it ourselves. We can also stop maintaining the old phone hardware we’ve been paying for. We’re going through a detailed review of our IT communications infrastructure, and when we’ve completed that project, Anca and I are sure we’ll have the numbers to show that switching to RingCentral was a major cost-cutting move for Minto.”

I’m very happy with the relationship we’ve developed with RingCentral. The team is always highly responsive and professional, and that makes all the difference when it comes to a business function as important as telephony. I’m looking forward to deepening our relationship with the RingCentral team and using even more of the platform’s capabilities.

Anca Preda

Vice President of IT

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