Goosehead Insurance Integrates Cell Phones Into Their Phone System

Goosehead Insurance Integrates Cell Phones Into Their Phone System – Case Study

This case study from RingCentral features Goosehead Insurance. Learn how a simple yet powerful phone system empowers them to provide world-class customer service and continue their mission to “put clients at the center of our universe and providing the power of choice coupled with delivering the best service in the world.” (GooseHead Insurance Who We Are) 

Company Profile: 

Goosehead Insurance (NASDAQ: GSHD) is one of the fastest-growing insurance brokerages in the United States. Founded in 2003, the company operates on a mission to “put clients at the center of our universe.” To provide the best value, services, and experience to its clients, the company has leveraged a top-quality team and cutting-edge technology to become one of the largest brokerages and is still in hyper-growth mode.

Searching for the best business phone solution.

But the company, which started with a mission to “put clients at the center of our universe,” found its on-premises phone system was holding it back from fulfilling that mission. The search for a better communications solution led to RingCentral.

“One of our claims to fame at Goosehead Insurance is we’ve built our entire business model around exceeding our clients’ needs,” says Michael Moxley, Goosehead’s Vice President of IT.

“We give them a tremendous choice of carriers and policies, and our independent franchisees deliver them the best client experience. Problem was, our legacy phone system was undermining the ability of both our in-house staff and our independent agents to deliver world-class service.”

One of the challenges in providing the best for their clients is their existing phone system which didn’t allow for self-service administration and too complicated to operate.

The team was also having a hard time monitoring calls since the existing phone infrastructure didn’t offer automated call-data reporting and analytics. To get this data, managers have to listen to numerous calls which can take too much time. And since the process is manual, the managers can oversee only a relatively small number of agents. Not enough to account for the overall performance of the business.

“If you wanted to get a sense of how your team or a specific agent handled calls, you’d have to listen to a bunch of them,” Moxley explains. “That took too much time, so our managers just listened in on a small percentage at random and hoped for the best. And partly because they didn’t have that automated data, our support managers could reasonably oversee only a relatively small number of agents—maybe 12 or 15 at most.”

“Because our IT team spent so much time in reactive mode, troubleshooting phones and responding to phone ticket requests, we didn’t have the time we needed to focus on proactive technology enablement that could help make our employees more productive—not to mention more satisfied with their jobs.”

Mobility is also another challenge for them. The team was unable to make and receive calls from any devices using their business number. They have to use their personal mobile phone if they need to answer a call while on the road or working remotely. Call forwarding is also difficult since they are unable to transfer a call from their personal mobile to an office extension. They need to advise the caller to hang up and dial the correct extension number. Not so much for customer experience.

“That means sales reps had to forward calls to their personal cell phones when they were on the road. And if they had to transfer a call to another employee while they were away from the office, they’d have to ask the caller to hang up and dial another number. That was not consistent with the professionalism or the customer-centric culture Goosehead built our business on.”

Integration is also another thing. With the legacy phone infrastructure, connecting with essential workflow apps such as Salesforce is next to nothing.

“This slowed things down for our front-line reps,” Moxley says, “because for every call they’d have to look up the number and call history in Salesforce, then dial the number manually. Then they’d have to copy their notes from the call back into Salesforce.”

The perfect cloud-based phone system.

“The more we researched the industry, the more blown away we were with RingCentral,” recalls Goosehead’s Managing Director Brad Giannini. “The RingCentral sales and tech teams were entirely transparent with us, the cloud communications solution itself was clearly the best in the industry, and RingCentral’s was the only solution we found that had a full integration and true partnership with Salesforce.”

“In fact,” adds Moxley, “during some of our scope meetings, RingCentral actually brought in some Salesforce developers to talk us through the details.”

Enjoying the benefits of simple yet powerful cloud communication.

After signing up for RingCentral, the team quickly recognizes the many benefits of a powerful business phone system. The seamless integration with Salesforce and Google Chrome allows for a single-click call saving the hassle of dialing the prospect’s numbers manually. Notes and other important information are updated automatically which saves them a lot of time doing data entry tasks. 

“The accolades and gratitude we’re hearing from our salespeople for switching to RingCentral is just amazing,” says Giannini. “We’d estimate the integrations with Salesforce and Google Chrome, which allow our reps to dial with a single click and automatically update prospects’ call histories, are saving them a couple of hours each day in tasks they used to do manually. RingCentral has definitely helped us empower our end users.”

“Another game-changer for our sales team is the ability to take and make business calls from any phone or even from their computers. This helps them look a lot more professional with clients and prospects, and it lets them be more productive anywhere.”

Increase efficiency and productivity with seamless integration

“We’re also increasing efficiency and productivity,” says Moxley. “Thanks to RingCentral’s Live Reports and Analytics Portal, which lets us view and analyze 100% of our calls, we’ve been able to increase our support managers’ team capacity by 50%—meaning one manager can now oversee a group of 22 to 25 service agents (up from 12 or 15 max). As we continue to expand our support team, we can do so without needing to fill as many costly management positions.”

With a functional and easy-to-manage phone infrastructure, the IT team has freed up its own time and allocate it for more strategic projects.

“The rollout itself has been incredibly smooth,” Moxley says. “We’ve set up about 1,500 users on RingCentral without having to hire a single additional IT resource. That never would have been possible with our old phone system.”

Call Reporting and Call Center Analytics

The call reporting and analysis tools are also providing valuable business intelligence that Goosehead’s sales and service teams didn’t have previously. Moxley explains: “With the Analytics Portal, we can automatically scan all transcripts of every call, look for keywords like ‘cancel,’ and then correlate those calls to carriers or specific policies. Then we can contact those carriers and say, ‘Hey, your prices are getting too high, or you have a service problem because your clients are calling us over and over to end their policies.’”

“Now that we finally have a communications solution that largely manages itself, we can spend more of our time on the technology enablement role that can really empower our employees to be more successful.”

“We’re now on an awareness and adoption mission to help expand usage of RingCentral’s features across the organization—for example, the integration with Outlook that lets us make calls and schedule meetings right in our email program. We’re also out there showing our staff how they can take advantage of all of RingCentral’s other solutions: online meetings, business texting, team chat, online faxing, and the integrations with apps like Chrome, Outlook, and Salesforce.”

Key Takeaways

Here are some of the benefits of a powerful business phone solution. 

• Stay connected anytime, anywhere. Their sales team now can take and make calls from any phone or computer, improving communication with clients and prospects. 
• Increase operational efficiency and productivity. 
• Save time and money.
• Better customer experience. 

Improve operational efficiency and boost customer experience. Find the best phone system for your business in 3 steps: Discovery, Design the Call Flow, and Installation. Get in touch with phone experts. 

This article Goosehead Insurance was originally published on RingCentral.