As any brand in the Professional Services landscape will know, there are many factors involved in running a successful business. There’s more to standing out in today’s competitive landscape than just selling expertise. Companies need to ensure they’re delivering the meaningful service and support their B2B customers are looking for too.
To deliver exceptional outcomes, many Professional Services brands are rapidly investing in more agile and innovative solutions for communications and productivity. This means investing not just in UCaaS technology but also in a range of accompanying communication tools.
Citation Professional Solutions, a leader in consulting support and employment law, worked hand-in-hand with the innovators at RingCentral to power a new age of digital transformation. Here’s how Citation and RingCentral joined forces.
Discovering a Need for Flexibility and Growth
Citation Professional Services has stood out as a leading provider of consulting support and employment law for organisations across the UK for more than 25 years. Committed to helping organisations navigate the administrative and legal responsibilities of business operations, Citation has achieved incredible results over the years.
Not only are the experts at Citation available 24/7 to guide their clients, but they also offer specialist guidance and assistance to companies in a range of industries. With over 50,000 customers throughout the UK, the brand has quickly emerged as one of the most sought-after consultancies in the market. They’re also leading the industry in client retention, with a rate of 92%.
Of course, in the Professional Services industry, success comes with new challenges to tackle. As the Citation brand continued to grow in recent years, the organisation discovered its telecom technology was stretching beyond breaking point. The only way to remain competitive was to shift into a modern, flexible, and scalable communication solution.
Switching Away from a Legacy Phone System
Citation’s telecommunications environment created a number of operational challenges long before the business began its accelerated growth phase. According to the Head of Technology Technical Services for the brand, Chris Haltof, as growth exploded, the system’s many shortcomings became more significant. Replacing the tech became the company’s top priority.
Chris noted the existing phone system didn’t allow for simple auditing, and there was no way of tracking who made administrative changes to the technology. The service was also extremely limited when it came to call recording capabilities. This was a significant problem as the company became more reliant on recording to serve its clients.
The brand only had a couple of months’ worth of call recordings to access with the legacy system, but they needed at least five years’ worth for arching purposes. The team was forced to build an internal workaround solution for archiving calls, which often took a lot of time and resources. The phone system also offered no mobile capabilities, requiring all employees to remain in the office.
Physical hard-line phones were the only option for making and taking business calls. This presented a significant obstacle as Citation wanted to implement more flexible working solutions for staff.
Researching the available cloud-based communication solutions on the market, the business eventually gravitated towards the flexible ecosystem offered by RingCentral. Citation’s Service Director, Lee Mills said the RingCentral solution checked a number of boxes, combining various critical functions into a single service.
The business could access desktop and mobile communication apps for teams, video conferencing tools, AI analytics, call centre functionality, security auditing and call recording in one platform. At the same time, the team was impressed by the service offered by RingCentral, stating that working with the team felt more like connecting with a partner than a vendor.
Achieving New Levels of Flexibility
RingCentral’s technology proved to be a wonderfully intuitive solution for Citation. Staff could easily begin using the service straight away, with minimal training. Additionally, the mobile staff (making up about 70% of the workforce) had access to tools they could access anywhere.
Before the pandemic hit, Citation had already begun to roll out the features of RingCentral and discover the benefits of a cloud-based ecosystem. However, when quarantines and lockdowns began to go into effect throughout the UK, the team was faced with a new challenge. Citation suddenly had to figure out how to transition the entire workforce into the landscape of remote work.
The technology team decided to accelerate the implementation of RingCentral, and the rest of the company began to discover the advantages of the cloud system too. According to Citation, the team is now using RingCentral Video to conduct remote inspections of client facilities in a simple, non-intrusive manner. Clients also appreciate Citation’s ability to continue offering sensational service without putting teams at risk.
Consultants can also take client calls quickly and conveniently at home. All the employees need to do is log into a RingCentral app on a smartphone or laptop to begin work. This means the brand has been able to continue offering sensational service, regardless of global challenges.
The Citation team is also taking advantage of RingCentral to help sales teams have more face-to-face conversations with clients and prospects. This allowed the brand to keep the sales engine moving through lockdowns and disruptions.
Staying Strong in Challenging Times
Having RingCentral in place during shelter-in-place orders made a significant difference from an IT and business standpoint.
Because Citation already had a flexible work-from-anywhere offering ready to go, they didn’t need to worry as much about setting hundreds of employees up with new equipment. All users needed was the RingCentral app and an internet-connected device.
With RingCentral, Citation could effectively unlock new levels of functionality to empower the internal team and discover new modes of customer service. The ability to align multiple UCaaS and CCaaS functions into one platform ensured the business could continue to transform, even when challenges were influencing companies from all industries.
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