Unified Communications is the key to unlocking a higher level of productivity, efficiency, and cost savings for companies in the hospitality industry. Aligning teams and employees within the same technology ecosystem directly impacts staff performance. However, it can also pave the way to better customer and guest experiences.
For companies like Original Cottages, the growing demand for a more advanced communication system became too significant to ignore in recent years. With the challenges of the pandemic to consider, and consistent growth to adapt to, the team decided it was time to enhance their UC strategy with support from RingCentral.
With RingCentral’s intelligent and cloud-based communication solutions, Original Cottages has been able to align teams better and drive a higher level of customer experience. Here’s how RingCentral and Original Cottages worked together.
Replacing Legacy Communications Technology
Original Cottages stands as one of the most popular family-owned letting agencies and hospitality companies in the UK. Part of the company’s phenomenal success is due to the unprecedented choice the agency offers current holiday makers. Whether you’re looking for a golf course cottage or a countryside holiday, there’s something for everyone.
Recently, the Original Cottages portfolio has grown significantly through organic expansion and the acquisition of smaller letting agencies around the country. This growth has benefited both the company and its customers substantially, but it has also highlighted a need for an upgraded communication strategy.
With more than 30 branded offices around the country and a central Sales and Support team located in the Norfolk main office, Original Cottages struggled to manage increasing daily phone calls from holidaymakers, customers, and property owners. Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Richard Sage explained that the phone system prevented the team from easily balancing call traffic based on the capacity of the units.
The company needed a way to centrally manage and distribute calls, making the process more efficient for everyone. Not only this, but the Original Cottage’s legacy phone system also led to significant vulnerability to outages for the tam. The phones were constantly giving out, and the team struggled to provide consistent service.
Upgrading to the RingCentral Ecosystem
As outages and communication problems grew increasingly overwhelming for the Original Cottages team, the company decided to start investigating other phone solutions. While there were many items on the company’s wish-list for the perfect new technology, there was one essential must-have – the system needed to be in the cloud.
Telephony was one of the few infrastructure areas for Original Cottages that hadn’t been shifted into the cloud, and the lack of flexibility was a severe problem. The absence of the cloud leads to a lack of sophisticated phone features like analytics, call-reporting, and scalability.
The company also wanted to ensure its new phone solution would provide the flexibility and mobility required to let employees work from anywhere, rather than tying them to a specific office. This was particularly crucial, though the company didn’t know it at the time, thanks to the impending challenges of the pandemic.
When the RingCentral unified cloud solution was introduced to the 400 employees throughout the Original Cottages company, the team began seeing the benefits almost straight away. Where the company had previously struggled to route calls to the right people, RingCentral made everything easyRingCentral made everything easy when the company had previously worked to route calls to the right people. The users could set up call queue groups in minutes and easily update routing instructions in seconds.
