For any entertainment company, a strong communication strategy is crucial to delivering exceptional customer service and better levels of productivity. Marlowe Theatre stands as one of the most significant innovators in the entertainment landscape for the UK, contributing to everything from the country’s economy to the education of students. 

The regional theatre of Kent, the Marlowe Theatre, is a leading non-profit organisation that attracts some of the biggest productions in the landscape. In the 2019 and 2020 season, the Marlowe Theatre sold more than 352,000 tickets, and around 3,000 young people took part in the learning and participation programmes within the theatre.

The incredible impact the Marlowe Theatre has had on UK entertainment is an excellent insight into how well the company is doing in its mission to ensure everyone has an opportunity to experience the magic the live theatre space has to offer. Of course, like many businesses, the Marlowe Theatre has also recently discovered just how important it is to have access to the right communications technology if it wants to continue excelling in its space. 

Let’s explore how RingCentral has helped Marlowe Theatre evolve.

Evolving from an Old-Fashioned Phone System

The Marlowe Theatre contributes around £41 million to the local economy, making it a significant part of the entertainment space in the UK. However, it also suffered from several outdated processes until recently. During the early years, the theatre functioned under the ownership of the city council of Canterbury, and therefore had to use the Council’s solutions for telephony and IT under the rules implemented by the government. 

Unfortunately, the telephony solutions available fell painfully short of Marlowe Theatre’s own needs, and the team behind the entertainment company saw a significant need for a change. In 2018, when the organisation became an independently-run charity, Marlowe Theatre began to do its research, even though it still had a two-year contract with its existing phone and call centre vendor. 

According to the IT and Finance Director for Marlowe Theatre, Paul Turner, the brand was locked into a telephony infrastructure that required onsite servers and lacked a lot of the functionality they needed. At the same time, the business telephony wasn’t integrated with the contact centre. The disjointed system often led to wasted time and complexity for teams.

During Marlowe Theatre’s evaluation of the available communications and contact centre solutions in the market, the company discovered RingCentral and placed it as its number one choice in terms of ease of use, flexibility, features, and cost. The RingCentral ecosystem was also one of the few to offer unified communications and contact centre solutions at the time.

With combined UC and contact centre technology, the entire business could use the same phone system and eliminate previous functionality challenges. RingCentral could even integrate with existing tools the theatre was used for chat, email, and CRM solutions, for a centralised and complete view of the customer.

Making the Transition into RingCentral

According to Jason Green, the Systems Manager at the Marlowe Theatre, the integrated environment offered by RingCentral revolutionised the way the team worked. Perhaps most importantly, transitioning into the RingCentral ecosystem was surprisingly straightforward. 

Despite the migration to a new communications solution often being a complex and time-consuming for many brands, Jason said the rollout was surprisingly smooth, with absolutely no significant hitches or issues to worry about. The Systems Manager believes much of the credit for the seamless migration can be attributed to the phenomenal support from RingCentral.

According to Green, the Professional Services team helped with everything from onboarding to setting up integrations and training team members. The new communications environment allowed Marlowe Theatre to unlock new levels of productivity. According to Paul, the old customer service infrastructure kept tools like email and telephony separate, which led to wasted time, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies for the team.

RingCentral allowed Marlowe to implement email right into the agent workflow and preloading answers to common questions. RingCentral also offered the Marlowe Theatre access to flexible and user-friendly call menus. The team has been able to set up various on-hold messages for members vs non-members and access priority numbers for major donors and VIPs. There’s even the call whisper feature to provide agents with essential information during a call. 

Through an aligned UC and contact centre environment, agents can collaborate more seamlessly over customer service issues. Marlowe is even leveraging the Chrome extension for RingCentral to boost agents’ productivity with click-to-dial functionality. 

All the while, bonus features like the ability to offer customers callbacks, so they don’t have to wait in a queue for an agent to be ready leads to a better overall customer experience, and stronger levels of customer satisfaction. 

Looking Ahead with RingCentral

Even before the pandemic really began to have an impact on the way the entertainment and TMT industries were running, Marlowe Theatre was discovering the benefits of moving into a more flexible and cloud-focused environment. During challenging times when the pandemic hit, RingCentral’s diverse ecosystem helped Marlowe’s staff to adapt to the challenges of remote working. 

For team members who didn’t want to use a separate device, there was even the option to simply download a RingCentral app on a personal smartphone device and control everything from status and availability, to secure business numbers from there.

As the business landscape continues to change for companies in all industries, the Marlowe Theatre believes that RingCentral will play a significant role in its ability to continue thriving and competing in a changing landscape. Moving to RingCentral’s combined UC and contact centre environment allows Marlowe Theatre to provide the level of personalised service their customers need. 

 

 



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