How did this wellness company survive a pandemic? | #customersupport #supporticket

For years, the wellness company Salud by Dr. Rigo (Salud Para Todos) has grown at an impressive pace—regularly developing new natural products, hiring staff, and expanding its customer base. Founded by medical doctor Jose Rigoberto Pérez Díaz, Salud grew into a global eCommerce company when Dr. Rigo recruited his entrepreneurial daughters, Sarah Pérez Jarrett and Hilda Pérez, to expand operations. But in 2020, the lockdowns threatened everything the company had worked for.

The Salud team saw the irony. A health company that became known around the world for helping people improve their wellbeing—by developing products to support respiratory and digestive functions, bone and joint health, skin rejuvenation, energy levels, and more—was suddenly forced to close its doors because a virus threatened the world’s health.

But Salud’s management team didn’t have time to focus on the problem. They had to devise a solution—their employees and customers were counting on them. And because the company had RingCentral, CEO Sarah and COO Hilda were able to devise and implement a solution almost immediately.

Transitioning team communications and customer support to the cloud

Both Salud’s primary storefront location and the company’s headquarters were based in New York City—which faced some of the strictest and most rapid shutdown mandates in the US. As Sarah recalls, “We had to make some huge changes overnight—starting with moving our entire shipping operation into my living room in Florida.”

With Salud’s employees all suddenly forced to work remotely, Sarah and Hilda needed to figure out both how to keep the staff connected and how to keep the company accessible to customers calling for products or other types of support. RingCentral helped to solve both challenges.

In terms of customer support, Sarah notes that the transition to a remote operation went surprisingly smoothly. “Our team all had the RingCentral apps on their cell phones and laptops so that everyone could answer calls to our customer service number from any of those devices. So even though we weren’t in the same place anymore, we were still able to cover those calls and keep giving our customers outstanding service.”

Maintaining internal communications proved an easy transition as well, which was particularly surprising considering that the Salud staff had expanded to include employees in Spain, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas. As Sarah explains, RingCentral Video made it easy to hold regular team meetings—sometimes just to give employees a chance to see each other face-to-face—no matter where people were geographically.

“RingCentral took the place of our old conference room,” she says. “We’d jump on video calls, get to see each other, and discuss whatever we needed to get done—marketing messaging, sales projects, or just catching up. It allowed us to keep feeling like a team.”

Gaining more communication insights than ever—with help from Konnectryx

Because the COVID-19 lockdowns placed greater importance on Salud’s use of cloud communications, Sarah and Hilda used the opportunity to investigate additional RingCentral tools and functionality to improve their operations. To help with this, they turned to Salud’s trusted IT consulting partner, Konnectryx.

Michael Amico, Konnectryx’s VP of Worldwide Sales, explains that one example of how his team helped unify and streamline Salud’s workflows was to implement a Salesforce platform for the company. “We helped train the team on some of the RingCentral features they hadn’t used before but would be using now—including RingCentral’s integration with Salesforce.”

Sarah points out that the Konnectryx team’s work led to many benefits—including improved workflows, cost savings, and greater insight than ever into the details of the company’s day-to-day operations.

“We had different systems collecting data, and our team was spending time re-entering that data from one system into another. Konnectryx’s great work consolidating everything into Salesforce and RingCentral helped us—both by making things run more efficiently and also saving us money.”  

Sarah continues: “My management team and I can see so much about what’s happening across the company now. We can make sure our customers, especially our long-term customers, are always getting their calls answered right away. We can see how quickly our team is picking up calls on average. We can even use RingCentral’s call recordings to settle disputes with credit card companies. It’s more visibility than we’ve ever had.”