We wanted to put the pendulum back into the middle, so we support our salespeople with a functioning outbound calling experience, and we support our customers with a good inbound calling experience. We also wanted to fix some adoption issues by improving the user experience. It was at this point that we started to speak to Ben about RingCentral.
Kevin Beadon
Group Head of IT at Bytes
As a leading provider of IT solutions and a Microsoft Partner of the Year in 2022, Bytes has been helping hundreds of top brands transform, grow and adapt to the changing technology landscape since 1982. Its growing portfolio of services spans ERP, cybersecurity, networking, storage, infrastructure – and more recently, unified communications. They became a RingCentral partner in 2021.
The opportunity
Bytes’ expertise really came into its own in the years following the pandemic. Organisations who had adopted Microsoft Teams predominantly for chat and video collaboration, were now looking to use it as more of a central hub for communication and collaboration. To do so, some firms felt they needed to elevate the Teams’ experience, particularly in the area of telephony. And with their RingCentral partnership well established by now, Bytes had a best-in-class solution ready to go.
“Customers want enterprise resiliency built into the backend, and that’s where the strength of our relationship with RingCentral lies,” explains Justin Powell, Modern Workplace UC Specialist at Bytes. “We offer them the full Teams experience inside the Teams interface, but we give them enterprise UC and contact centre sitting behind it. That’s one of the big drivers for us.”
RingCentral offers customers two options for integrating its cloud phone solution into Teams. The first is through an embedded RingCentral app that sits in the sidebar of Teams – this means the business won’t need to buy a Teams phone licence. The second is through direct routing (Teams phone licence required), which enables people to use the native Teams dialler for an even more seamless user experience.
INDUSTRY
Software services
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Adopting RingCentral for its own telephony
As the partnership grew, Bytes began to realise that their own telephony system was in need of an upgrade. After years of trying to make on-premises phone solutions work, Bytes had not found one that performed well for both outbound and inbound calling. One solution worked fine for outbound calls, but the in-bound calling experience was riddled with issues. Another solution, fixed inbound calling issues – to the delight of customers – but made the outbound calling experience a lot more complex.
On top of that, Bytes’ existing phone vendor had stopped all upgrades for the on-premises technology. It was clear they needed to look quickly for another solution.
We wanted to put the pendulum back into the middle, so we support our salespeople with a functioning outbound calling experience, and we support our customers with a good inbound calling experience. We also wanted to fix some adoption issues by improving the user experience. It was at this point that we started to speak to Ben about RingCentral.
Kevin Beadon
Group Head of IT at Bytes
After rigorously evaluating different options, and conducting workshops with key internal users to find out what they needed from a phone solution, Bytes chose the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams embedded dialler and then RingCentral direct routing.
Improving productivity
Employees are now making and receiving calls in Teams – the application they are most familiar with – but quietly in the background, RingCentral is providing 99.999% uptime (the industry gold-standard) and powering enhanced capabilities, such as hunt groups, advanced caller ID management, and more robust analytics. Through a RingCentral–Microsoft Dynamics integration, Bytes employees can also provide a more personalised customer experience and streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and boost productivity by using RingCentral across all Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications.
Kevin gives a specific example of how a RingCentral feature has saved time and increased productivity: an AI function that turns voicemails into emails.
Most people don’t even listen to their voicemails anymore because they can read the automated email. The fact that I don’t have to listen to my voicemail, it’s only a saving of five minutes, but multiply that by X number of calls per day, then spread that across the company, and it really adds up. It's an accumulation of productivity.
Kevin Beadon
Group Head of IT at Bytes
Knowing the solution, inside out
Another plus point is that Bytes’ advisers now have first-hand experience of using the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams for their day-to-day work. This means they can offer customers a more detailed appraisal of how both solutions work together.
Ben Hollyer, Senior Regional Partner Manager, RingCentral, explains how this is an advantage to the Bytes team: “When Bytes’ account managers are having conversations with their customers, they can use the fact they use both solutions in one. They can show both sides of the fence, without being biased, and that works well in their favour.”
What does the future look like?
On the partnership front, Bytes and RingCentral continue to go from strength to strength, with Bytes recently achieving the coveted RingCentral Reach™ Gold Partner Status. Only a small subset of RingCentral partners globally earn this distinction, and it means that Bytes has the expertise and means to handle RingCentral migrations from start to finish.
When it comes to how Bytes wants to tap more into RingCentral’s solution, they have signalled their interest in:
- Enhancements like RingCentral’s HD video with AI-powered time-saving features, such as live transcription and advanced meeting insights.
- Further integration with the likes of Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, to simplify workflows and unify more of the desktop.
- The new RingCentral 2.0 embedded dialler.