RingCentral is helping the US’s largest temporary physician staffing company lower its telephony costs by $1.1M | #customersupport #supporticket

Highlights:

• Improved mobility: RingCentral’s soft phone and mobile app allow the company’s 2,000+ staffing professionals to make and receive secure business calls anywhere.

• Seamless integrations: CHG is leveraging RingCentral integrations with Salesforce, Google Chrome, and Okta to streamline everyday workflows and improve efficiencies.

• Significant savings: Migrating the company’s communications infrastructure to the cloud with RingCentral, CHG projects it will save $1.1M over the next two years.

The largest provider of temporary healthcare staffing in the US

Healthcare organizations face a constant challenge to keep their facilities properly staffed—whether it’s due to nurses and doctors going on vacation, or because a seasonal spike in illness requires a short-term increase in staff. When organizations need to fill medical roles temporarily, they turn to the staffing agency that literally invented this model: CHG Healthcare.

A full-service healthcare staffing company, CHG was also the world’s first agency to offer “locum tenens” service—placement of medical professionals in temporary positions to meet healthcare organizations’ short-term staffing needs. Today, more organizations turn to CHG for their locum tenens roles than to any other firm.

With RingCentral, the US’s Largest Physician Staffing Firm Anticipates Saving $1.1M in Telephony Costs

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A softphone solution that wasn’t fit for the COVID lockdowns

When the 2020 lockdowns were announced, CHG had to send nearly its entire workforce home—roughly 3,000 employees at offices in several states. Terry Smith, Director of IT Operations, explains that this move happened so quickly, his team had no choice but to use the softphone client offered by CHG’s on-prem phone system.

“Our softphone got us through that initial transition to remote work, but we realized fairly soon that it was creating workflow challenges,” Terry explains. “Our employees had to VPN in, so we were having to manage our own private cloud. Everyone’s call experience was dependent on their home’s internet connections, which weren’t always sufficient to support business calls.”

In their cloud telephony search, RingCentral provided the winning formula

As these remote telephony challenges became more pronounced, Terry and his team conducted a thorough review of cloud communications providers. RingCentral stood out on the key factors CHG had prioritized, including company reputation, product features, ease of use, and potential savings.

But the deciding factors, Terry explains, were RingCentral’s extensive app gallery and open API platform—both of which would allow CHG to integrate cloud telephony into many of the company’s workflows to create new efficiencies.

Improving workflows with RingCentral’s app gallery

“Of our 3,000 employees, about 1,800 use Salesforce. With the RingCentral for Salesforce integration, those teams have found several ways to improve their workflows: click-to-dial, the screen-pop that brings up a caller’s profile, and auto-logging, which keeps our agents from having to manually enter data into Salesforce after every call.”

CHG has also rolled out other integrations discovered in the RingCentral app gallery. With the RingCentral for Google Chrome Extension, the several hundred CHG employees who don’t use Salesforce can also leverage RingCentral’s click-to-dial capability within their Google environment. Terry adds, “Even our teams that have Salesforce also use the Chrome Extension to make calls when they’re not in their Salesforce environment.”

Additionally, CHG implemented the RingCentral for Okta integration, which allows for multi-factor authentication into the company’s RingCentral environment. “The Okta integration is valuable because it helps us provide an extra layer of security for our communications, which is particularly important in the healthcare industry.”

Creating custom workflows with RingCentral’s APIs

CHG is also finding ways to customize new workflows using RingCentral’s call log API. For example, Terry explains, “Our BI team wrote a replication process for our old phone system, to pull specific call data into a SQL database and give it to different departments to share insights into their teams’ performance.”

“RingCentral’s API made it easy for the BI team to recreate that process in our new telephony environment, without having to rebuild any of their custom code.”

Lowering the company’s telephony costs significantly

When Terry and his team analyzed the cost of their new RingCentral environment against CHG’s previous communications infrastructure, they discovered the reduction in telephony costs over the next couple of years would be far higher than they’d originally estimated. 

“Moving our entire organization onto RingCentral is changing how we pay for telephony in several ways,” he says. “We no longer have the standard long-distance calling rates we were paying. We won’t need to buy telephony hardware anymore. And we’ll be consolidating several communication services onto RingCentral, which we’ve been paying for separately, such as video conferencing and faxing.”

“Based on our projections, we anticipate RingCentral is going to reduce our overall telephony expenses by $600,000 in 2022 alone, and then another $500,000 the following year. I’d call that a win.”

Originally published Dec 09, 2021, updated Dec 10, 2021