NFP Embraces a Communications Platform That Supports Their Rapid Expansion | #customersupport #supporticket

Few companies experience rapid growth like National Financial Partners (NFP), a leading property and casualty broker, benefits consultant, wealth manager, and retirement plan advisor, which acquires one or more smaller firms each month. Long an early adopter of innovative technology, NFP, a New York-based, Madison Dearborn-held company, encountered limitations with its previous cloud based communications solution–which lacked native AI technology integrations and a full-featured contact center.

NFP needed a secure and integrated cloud-based communications platform which would enable greater mobility for its employees and a best-in-class experience for its customers. After carefully considering many vendors, NFP tapped RingCentral’s RingCentral MVP® (Message Video Phone™) and RingCentral Contact Center™ to achieve its objectives, enabling its 8,000-plus employees to collaborate and work more effectively across the United States, Canada, and EMEA.

“Knowing how to accelerate communications at the right time is everything,” said Mark Grosvenor, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at NFP. “This rapid migration helped us to outpace our competitors and sustain high customer and employee satisfaction levels.”

When Grosvenor’s team decided to migrate from the prior system to RingCentral, he anticipated organizational pushback. “Everybody was concerned that, like, wait a minute, ‘I don’t think we can move on working from home these days. You can’t throw something new at me. What if my telephone doesn’t work? What if it doesn’t ring? What if my clients can’t get a hold of me?’“

Instead, the migration was a “non-event, which from a change management perspective is the best comment we could get,” recalls Grosvenor. The rollout was “much more seamless than we ever expected.”

Grosvenor explains that the shift to RingCentral wasn’t just to keep their communication lines up and running. The new platform will improve their communications in various ways, says Grosvenor, who prioritized finding “the best-integrated telephony solutions, innovative AI tools, and market-leading analytics — all in a secure environment.”

Meeting global security standards is a must for NFP. NFP must satisfy stringent regulations about managing client information, from usage to storage and must record and store calls and texts made on RingCentral applications.

“There’s a lot of regulation around what an individual can do when they text a client, what information can be in it, what things can go back and forth,” said NFP’s Grosvenor. “And, as a result, all that has to be archived. So being able to do that from one phone number and not have that be over an individual’s personal cell line is essential,” he adds. The retention occurs in the RingCentral application and is backed up to the cloud — with 99.999% availability.

The primary use case for the call recording is in NFP’s 600-agent contact center. Kim Ragland, AVP of Technology Operations at NFP, referred to their prior solution as “immature” in comparison and added that by selecting RingCentral Contact Center, NFP found the stability, security, and call recording capabilities necessary to meet global compliance requirements. “Previously, we lacked a clear picture of the queues and the agents’ status,” said Ragland. “Now we can see so much more information. We can go in and look up a call recording, trace a contact center interaction, and determine why a caller ended up somewhere.”

RingCentral Contact Center includes a comprehensive set of administrative control across message, video, and phone that meet industry and regulatory standards, such as SOC 2 and SOC 3 attestation, HITRUST, FINRA, and GDPR. Ragland noted that she “really appreciates” achieving compliance, adding, “It’s extremely helpful to us as an organization,” particularly when pulling SOC reports.

What’s in the works

As the rollout continues, NFP plans to drive greater productivity and higher engagement among customers and employees with integrations and feature enhancements.

• Advanced telephony features, including SMS: NFP employees can now use SMS with their clients, which their previous legacy system could not support. With RingCentral, all SMS data is archived and retained centrally and securely as needed for regulatory purposes.
• Integration with Microsoft Teams: NFP employees can boost productivity with RingCentral’s purpose-built experience for Microsoft Teams, leveraging innovative features including voicemail transcription, call recording, bi-directional presence sync, and unified contact search.
• Integration with Salesforce: “We have a bit of Salesforce, and our next focus will be integrations with our Contact Center,” says NFP’s Ragland. “We can help agents verify contacts and take some time away. That’s a huge win for the client and for us.”

• AI-powered insights: NFP can leverage AI to provide real-time coaching and assistance and help its agents automate mundane tasks so they can focus on complex issue resolution.
• Real-time analytics:  With tools to simplify forecasting and better monitor and measure agent performance, NFP leaders can better assist with issue resolution and drive optimal productivity.

NFP worked closely with RingCentral diamond partner John Alexander Consulting (JAC), a carrier and cloud-neutral consulting firm, to select RingCentral for NFP’s technology strategy. By leveraging their deep technical acumen in tandem with their tenured experience advising global highly acquisitive holding firms, JAC crafted custom agreement terms that mirrored the buying and implementation patterns of NFP and established digital agility for future growth and innovation.

JAC has supported technology solutions for NFP over the last 15 years. “As an extension of NFP’s team, we are deeply versed in their technology strategy and committed to identifying not only the best-performing platform to support their current needs, but also one that would support economies of scale, rapid installation, and pivotal redirection to match technology evolution,” said Alexis Pomierski, Executive Director at JAC. It’s an aggressive migration schedule–this process has required all parties to be “flexible and creative” to reach the collective goal. Given the steady acquisitions, in essence, migration remains a moving target but has been a positive experience for all to date.

“Getting all of our employees aligned and working on the same multi-modal Unified Communications and Contact Center platform enables us to improve our customer service, operate with high productivity, and strengthen our company culture,” said NFP’s Grosvenor. “So far, we couldn’t be any happier with how things are going.”

Originally published Sep 12, 2023