Cosentino uses RingCentral to lower telephony costs and unite its 6,000 employees in 80 countries | #customersupport #supporticket

Highlights:

• Improving workflows: The RingCentral integration for Microsoft Teams lets employees make and receive business calls anywhere, on any device, right from their Teams app. 

• Lowering costs: Eliminating phone hardware maintenance, high carrier fees, and an external IT help desk has helped Cosentino significantly reduce its telephony expenses.

• Going green: Replacing its power-hungry on-prem phone systems with the fully hosted RingCentral is helping the company lower its carbon footprint – a key corporate mission.

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The lockdowns accelerated a search for a more capable telephony platform

Like many international organizations, Cosentino built its global telephony environment organically, adding standard phone infrastructure (landlines, desk phones, local carrier contracts) at each new location it opened around the world.

Diego Zengin, the company’s Global Communications, Architecture, Operatons and AV Director, explains that although this approach wasn’t as efficient or cost-effective as it could’ve been, it was manageable.

 Then the 2020 lockdowns revealed a major vulnerability in the company’s on-prem phone infrastructure. As Diego explains, “Now that most of our employees couldn’t come into their offices and take business calls, we were suddenly missing communications from customers and unable to stay connected to our colleagues around the world.”

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RingCentral provides the all-in-one solution the team needed

In their search for a cloud telephony solution, Diego’s team was focused on two key factors: finding a global partner capable of supporting the company’s locations all over the world, and finding a phone solution that would integrate seamlessly into Cosentino’s Microsoft Teams environment. Only one cloud communication provider, Diego notes, checked both boxes.

“RingCentral was the only company that could support us globally right away – to get us up and running with local numbers anywhere we had a presence. No other provider even came close.” And here’s how Diego describes Cosentino’s experience with the RingCentral embedded dialer for Microsoft Teams:

“Since the pandemic, our employees are on the Microsoft Teams app all day, and we didn’t want to disrupt that workflow. The RingCentral Teams integration is great because it lets us give every employee full cloud phone capability – especially the ability to take and make business calls from anywhere – right in the Teams environment they’ve probably got open on their computer or mobile phone.”

One of the biggest benefits RingCentral provides for Cosentino, Diego explains, is the ease of configuring and adjusting the telephony environment of any office, customer showroom, factory, or other type of location around the world.

Making even small changes to an office’s phone system used to take time and require the help of a local carrier or consultant. But with RingCentral’s user-friendly IVRs, Diego says, “It’s so easy now for a team at any office to go into the RingCentral admin portal and set up their greeting, menus, routing rules, whatever they need. And even if that office is in a tiny town in Italy, we can give it a local number, which customers appreciate.”

Improving their IT help desk experience with RingCentral Contact Center 

With RingCentral’s all-in-one telephony capabilities – including the Contact Center solution for customer service and sales teams – Cosentino also saw an opportunity to manage its internal IT support operation internally.

“We were using an external provider for our help desk, and we realized RingCentral Contact Center would allow us to bring that operation in-house – which would help us lower costs and provide a better experience for our users. And all the feedback I’ve received from employees is that Contact Center is making it easier to get their IT issues resolved.”

Helping Cosentino make another area of its business eco-friendly

José Manuel Rodríguez Jiménez, Cosentino’s Global Chief Information Officer, points out that migrating to RingCentral has also helped further one of the company’s most important objectives: to continually find ways to reduce its environmental impact.

“With everything we do at Cosentino – from choosing materials for the surfaces we design, to the way we run our offices – we try to minimize our effect on the environment. Switching to RingCentral supported that goal perfectly, because it meant eliminating desk phones, other hardware, and generally lowering the carbon footprint of our telephony environment. That’s one more reason we’re grateful for RingCentral.”

Originally published Aug 07, 2023