RingCentral Leverages Freshservice to Quickly Move 1,000+ Employees from Desktop to Work from Anywhere

Executive Summary

RingCentral is a publicly-traded provider of cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions for businesses that help lower customer costs by removing the need for on-premises telephone systems. Their Office, Professional, and Fax products offer users features such as multiple extensions, call control & routing, video & web conferencing, and multiple database integration. They have locations in London, Paris, Manila, Xiamen, and many more. 

RingCentral faced a critical challenge in the wake of COVID. They needed to adapt on the fly and convert 1000’s of office workers to work remotely in a matter of days, not weeks or months.    Thanks to Freshworks’ Freshservice, RingCentral’s IT could handle the inevitable spike in support issues and the resulting increased ticket volume. With Freshservice’s knowledge base, automation, and solid support team, RingCentral could mitigate concerns much more efficiently than before.

 

Overcoming the Limits of Legacy ITSMs 

RingCentral’s IT Infrastructure was previously managed via an internally customized leading CRM application. A simple change to the environment required a lot of development resources and would backlog the IT team. “We were operating with an outdated leading Legacy CRM environment,” says Fred Chin, Senior Director of IT End-User Services. “Since we had a heavily customized implementation, we weren’t able to smoothly update to the latest version.”

“Our previous ticketing system wasn’t an ITSM solution,” continues Fred. “It provided a lot of in-house customization, which is great, but doesn’t allow us to move at the rate we needed to.” The trade-off between customization and an incumbent system inevitably created a clunky experience.

 

Spinning Up Instances in a Moment’s Notice

The IT team began searching for a better-suited tool in 2019. They compared several industry ITSM solutions against Freshservice. “Freshservice was a much better choice for us,” says Fred. “Compared to the other solutions, Freshservice was a much easier sell internally; it made collaboration across multiple departments simple and efficient. Being able to bring other internal teams up-to-speed and spin up requests is a win across the board.”

 

Transforming a Department During a Crisis

Freshservice went live early March, just as the pandemic was spreading. Similar to many other businesses, Covid-19 presented several unique challenges - chief among them their employee’s ability to work from remote locations. 

Fred recounts how the pandemic affected global offices: “We didn’t experience any problems from a communication standpoint. We primarily used our platform to maintain a high-level of contact between team members, but asset distribution was an issue.” For example, RingCentral’s IT Global Service Desk in Manila experienced the brunt of the impact. Most employees in Manila offices work with desktop computers. When the work from home orders came through, IT had to come up with a solution that didn’t include buying laptops for employees. “We had to quickly get the Manila team up and running,” continued Fred. “Employees could easily access their workspaces from anywhere via our virtual machines.”

Having developed a solution so quickly and without really getting the chance to test it, there were bound to be problems. “Typically, to justify and roll out a proper implementation  6-9 months. We had to deploy a solution to 1000’s of users in a week,” says Fred. “Additionally, there were several hundred difficult cases we had to do on the fly. It helped us with the ability to get feedback as they ran these instances through its paces.”

It is normal that IT would get a multitude of issues given the speed of deployment. Rather than meticulously test out an environment for a year before deploying, the team was forced to develop an entire virtual system in a sprint. With Freshservice’s built-in features, our IT team could manage questions and issues quicker than ever before.

• Knowledge Base: Improved efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge. By quickly categorizing and deploying articles, the team was sometimes able to route requests to articles created earlier the same day.

• Automated Workflows, Scenarios and Responses: Automated repetitive tasks and manual processes soon after they were identified, saving agents time by not working on repetitive tickets.

• Professional Services: Received on-the-fly quality support from Freshworks professionals, maximizing Freshservice’s product potential during critical times.

 

Pivoting Towards Improved Operations

The Pandemic accelerated RingCentral’s divergence from the company’s usual engineering discipline of release management for an IT solution. But Freshservice has helped IT slice and dice all requests to make the work more manageable. “Freshservice was a big help. In Manila, we were constantly having to pivot from problem to problem,” says Fred. “Freshservice has opened up our eyes to deploying new processes in a new fashion. We’re no longer constrained by our legacy ITSM system. Previously everything was manual.

Freshservice automation gives us peace-of-mind.” Fred is actively looking for other ways where Freshservice can help create more efficient and productive operations.

For RingCentral, Freshservice is more than just an ITSM tool. The ability to allow new users, customize different workflows for different departments transforms Freshservice into an Enterprise Service Management platform. The IT department decided to increase the scope of their project by adding other departments outside of IT to the platform thus boosting their agent count from 200 to 275, a nearly 40% increase.

With Freshservice, IT can manage operations under one instance and develop unique experiences for different departments. “We’ve had good feedback from different departments,” says Fred. “Beyond the departments we added as part of the launch, Marketing and Sales are now coming to us to develop unique workflows, yielding stronger reporting and internal training through Freshservice. It’s allowed us to think outside the box.”

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