Switching to RingCentral helped this top government contractor cut its telephony costs by 66% | #customersupport #supporticket

When a department or agency of the United States government wants to modernize its operations, that organization will often turn to NCI Information Systems. NCI is a leading provider of advanced IT solutions—including the company’s own proprietary artificial intelligence technology—to defense and civilian agencies across the federal government.

In 2020 alone, NCI received an $89 million contract to build out the IT infrastructure for a secure US Army facility, as well as a $28 million order to modernize health IT systems for the Defense Health Agency. And in 2021, the US General Services Administration (GSA) awarded NCI an $807 million contract to lead that agency’s digital transformation, leveraging NCI’s Empower™ Artificial-Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) platform.

In fact, for years this top government contractor has been so focused on delivering outstanding IT solutions to its clients that NCI allowed one aspect of its own IT infrastructure—specifically its phone system—to become an operational problem.

An on-premises phone system that couldn’t meet the company’s needs

For any organization that rapidly adds staff and locations in new geographic regions, keeping the growing team connected and operating efficiently can be a challenge with a traditional business phone system. But CIO Vasili Ikonomidis explains that NCI’s unique circumstances made this even more difficult.

“As a government contractor, we have regulatory and security factors requiring us to maintain two separate networks to serve different categories of clients—and that also means two completely different call centers,” Vasili says. “We tried to manage this with our on-premises phone system, but that system was just too old and not sophisticated enough to support the type of operations we needed from it.”

NCI’s legacy telephony platform was so old, in fact, that Vasili’s team needed to pay an outside IT firm to help support it. “Anytime we had an issue, or if we just wanted to make a minor update to the system, we had to enlist the consultant’s help,” he says. “In fact, in many cases even they couldn’t solve the issue, so we had to try the phone provider directly.”

Telephony costs that had spiraled out of control

As Vasili also explains, NCI had been adding new locations to support clients’ missions in different parts of the country. Each of those facility build-outs only added confusion, complexity, and costs to the company’s telephony infrastructure. “Everything was decentralized,” he says. “If you can think of a major telecom provider, chances are one of our locations was paying that company for phone, internet, or some other service. It was a giant tangled mess.”

Deploying RingCentral Video created efficiencies and improved internal operations

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RingCentral helps improve operations—and cut telephony costs by two-thirds 

When they migrated to RingCentral’s cloud-based communications solution, NCI solved these and other operational issues. The RingCentral Engage customer-service platform, for example, enabled the company to run its call center operations more efficiently than ever.

“With RingCentral Engage, our agents now have key capabilities like automated outbound dialing and screen popups showing them the relevant details about the next company they’re calling.”

Another key operational improvement was being able to host online meetings for as many people as the company needed—a capability NCI didn’t have before. As Vasili explains: “With our other conferencing app, we’d start having call-quality problems if we had too many people join. RingCentral Video has been ideal because we’re able to invite as many people as we wanted to these calls, and we haven’t had any capacity or quality issues.”

Also, Vasili points out: “With our old system, which was a couple of years past end of life, we’d hear about call-quality issues from an agent or customer a couple of times a week. Now that we’re on RingCentral Engage, that number has fallen to basically zero issues.”

But perhaps the biggest change has been to NCI’s bottom line. As Vasili notes, the company is realizing enormous cost savings in several ways. “RingCentral is so easy to manage ourselves that one of the first things we did after the migration was end the contract with the consulting firm supporting our old system—which saved us $60,000 a year.”

“Now,” he continues, “as we consolidate all these services around the country for phone, video conferencing, online fax, team messaging, and our call center into a single solution with one vendor, we’re getting our monthly telephony costs down from $66,000 to $22,000.”