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Still Not a Telephony Guy, But...
By Boyd's characterization all is going well across the board, with any problems that have cropped up residing with World Vision, not RingCentral. Boyd said he's never before been a customer advocate for a vendor, but gladly took on that role based on his experiences with the RingCentral service. "The reality is, I'm a believer because they keep meeting and exceeding my expectations."
The RingCentral calling experience, for example, has put to bed the initial nervousness Boyd said he had regarding voice quality at World Vision headquarters, where hundreds of employees work. "I was nervous about our ability to deliver quality voice to 700 people -- not that they would all be using the phones simultaneously, but I was nervous whether or not cloud-based was really going to be able to do that," he said.
Tune in to hear more from World Vision's Randy Boyd, including talking points on:
And while Boyd still doesn't consider himself a telephony guy, he and his team can now answer questions on the calling infrastructure far more accurately than anyone could previously have done. Based on RingCentral call reports, he can tell precisely how many inbound and outbound calls have come, as well as the number of calls in the call queue, average wait time, which agents answered which calls, number of calls abandoned, as so on. "We have all of those statistics available, out of the box, with the native RingCentral product, not with a contact center add-on," he noted.
And he now knows a thing or two about porting numbers -- "the biggest nightmare you'll ever experience," Boyd said, suggesting that others plotting cloud migrations are going to want to get a handle on this aspect, pronto. "Regardless of what cloud provider you find, you need to start very early with the most knowledgeable person at that cloud provider who understands porting ... because the rules around porting and what the vendors will and won't let you do really end up dictating [your implementation plans]," Boyd said.
Due to carrier rules around how many numbers you can port in X amount of days, for example, World Vision ended up having to convert everybody at the headquarters office to cloud telephony in a single day -- actually in one hour. "I was either going to need to take 12 months to convert the facility or I was going to do it all in one day. Those were the two choices," he said.
Boyd manages the cloud UC environment with three other folks, like him, none of whom come from telephony backgrounds. And here's one more learning Boyd has gained in playing telephony guy: With name-based search and click-to-dial capabilities such as those offered in RingCentral Office, the importance of an actual phone number diminishes. "Old school guys kind of cling to their DIDs and their numbers and their ranges," he said, "but the reality is that world is drifting away. How many people know their mom's phone number? You just select the name "Mom" on your phone and let it dial."
And, yes, he said, he knows he's just spoken heresy to legacy telephony guys.
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