Despite the continued growth of cloud communications, there’s still a very large install base that has resisted the move to a modern, flexible, and feature-rich communications solution. Certainly, there are some legitimate reasons, including the desire to get as much return on prior investments as possible – though the argument can be made that the benefits of cloud communications exceed legacy systems by a significant margin that make the investment immediately worthwhile. Others, though, haven’t found the right solution to match their needs.
There’s no question there is plenty of choice when it comes to communications providers, but many of them look quite similar in terms of their capabilities.
The market he’s talking about – and which RingByName is specifically addressing – is businesses that want to standardize on a single cloud-based platform, but need multi-tenant capabilities to manage their individual locations, including retail chains, franchise operations, and MSPs. These individual locations are part of large market of distributed SMBs that are part of larger enterprises, but have separately managed PBXs. Those individual locations are a massive SMB market, though sometimes hidden under an enterprise label.
Managed IT providers also fall into this umbrella, managing communications for their SMB clients and, therefore, needing the same kinds of multi-tenant PBX solution, considering voice represents an opportunity for them to add value and recurring revenue to their offerings.
RingByName, a division of Inphonex, delivers its multi-tenant cloud PBX designed to meet the needs of SMB end customers through its Enterprise Hero Platform. It was specifically built to handle multiple separate instances with a single sign-on and a single interface for IT or admin teams, which reduces management and troubleshooting time (and cost). In fact, customers say their support efficiency increases by 65-79% with the RingByName platform.
But, despite a single management interface, each location can be individually configured with its own unique settings – there are no limitations that companies often find with centralized configuration. In addition, billing can be done on an aggregate or location basis, or even using cost center-based billing, to allow businesses to more effectively manage their costs and resources.
Of course, besides making it easy to manage multiple instances, RingByName also provides the PBX features you’d expect in a business communications solution that are suitable for all SMBs, whether they’re extensions of larger enterprises or truly independent SMBs. But, it also adds some great contact center functionality that allows these businesses to play the part of larger enterprises and treat customers with the professionalism and personalization they expect today.
That includes customer identification and customer journey information, along with a useful call abandonment feature that identifies abandoned engagements and puts them into a missed opportunities queue. From that queue, then, agents can contact those customers through a click-to-dial interface to proactively call that customer back. Of course, if the customer calls back before they are contacted by an agent, they are automatically removed from the missed opportunities list. It’s a highly effective way to handle a situation every business has to contend with.
RingByName also has an integrated CRM, through which it says it can provide Salesforce- or Zoho (News - Alert)-like capabilities via a web or mobile portal – but at a much lower cost.
One of the really interesting features the company is working on is affinity routing, which will use customer and agent preferences and attributes to connect callers with agents. The idea is that similar traits or preferences will have a higher rate of positive outcomes and, while that may not always play out, Godoy says that for its pilot project with a mortgage lender, agents are aware there is some commonality and the result was 65% more loans being underwritten. While that alone doesn’t speak to the success of the model, the fact that the default rate on those loans was 70% lower that others does.
There are plenty of cloud solutions out there that deliver great functionality. But, most of them are looking to serve all customers with a large enterprise product. That leaves a huge SMB market that presents itself in many forms – true single-site SMBs, multi-location or distributed enterprises comprising many SMB-type locations, or MSPs that serve as hosts for their SMB customers. That’s the market RingByName is focused on with a solution that gives small businesses the communications power to compete, while giving their IT organizations the tools to easily and efficiently to manage those communications solutions.