Academia has some great news! We are now selling RingCentral, the #1 market-leading cloud communications and collaboration solution! More flexible and cost-effective than legacy on-premises systems, RingCentral empowers today’s mobile and distributed workforces to be connected anywhere and on any device through voice, video, team messaging, SMS, conferencing, contact center, and fax. RingCentral also provides an open platform that integrates with today’s leading cloud business apps while giving customers the flexibility to customize their own workflows

Why Academia have migrated to RingCentral and why you should to!

We spoke to staff working in different parts of the business to see how RingCentral has improved the way that they work. First up, Dave Prince (Senior Microsoft and Infrastructure Consultant) who was responsible for the RingCentral implementation to offer his opinion on the ease of set up and use. Dave says:

‘Academia undertook a telephony refresh project 9 months ago to replace our out-dated platform and move to a platform where users weren’t tied to a physical handset. During the early phases of this project, we reviewed multiple phone systems, called in multiple parties and did a lot of background research on them to see how they all stacked up …. RingCentral won, and by quite a fair way.

There are a lot of very good telephony solutions out there but RingCentral was by far the most complete; from the available feature set, administrative experience and (almost) more importantly, the end user experience. The seamless use of the platform, whether from our laptops (Windows and Mac), mobile devices (iOS and Android) or from a physical phone is very user intuitive and the time taken to learn the platform is far less than any other phone system I’ve encountered. 

From an administration perspective, whilst there are a couple of advanced tasks which are not exposed to the administrator, this is helped massively by the very efficient and knowledgeable support desk who get back to you in no time. With the sharp rise in remote working since March this year, we were lucky enough to get the platform in play and completed beforehand, resulting in the shift from office working to remote working completely transparent. Would I recommend RingCentral to others? Absolutely.’

Next in line for our interrogation is Academia’s Technical Director, James Dancer offering his opinion on RingCentral’s capability for remote workers. James says:

‘RingCentral’s platform has been fantastic for remote working. Many of our staff members were mobile before COVID-19 anyway, but the benefit has been even more apparent since – the fact RingCentral’s platform works on Windows, macOS, Web, iOS and Android means that wherever we are and whatever devices we’re on, we can make and receive calls. My personal favourite is CarPlay integration – for the first time I can call people from my corporate DDI from the car using nothing but Voice… an absolute must if you want to avoid your mobile number being out in the wild!’

Finally, we spoke to Luke Holdcroft-Young (Sales Director) and asked him to share his views on RingCentral and how it has affected his ability to manage his team remotely. Luke says:

‘With our team having to migrate to a more remote working environment this year, the flexibility around which operating system or device my team use has been a difference maker. We utilise a mixed estate of Windows and Mac devices, so having a unified comms system that mitigates any concerns around activity makes it’s so much easier for me to report on call statistics and activity levels.

Having a reliable UC solution means my team can remain contactable with each other, but most importantly with their customers. I can rest easy in the knowledge that we have a reliable system in place giving us unbroken communication, as well as the tools I need to measure the impact of my team.’