CHG Healthcare
With RingCentral, the US’s Largest Physician Staffing Firm Anticipates Saving $1.1M in Telephony Costs
$1.1M
PROJECTED TELEPHONY SAVINGS OVER TWO YEARS THANKS TO RINGCENTRAL
3,000
EMPLOYEES ONBOARDED TO RINGCENTRAL IN UNDER 8 WEEKS, WITH A TELEPHONY STAFF OF JUST 2
4
RINGCENTRAL INTEGRATIONS: SALESFORCE, CHROME OKTA, AND SQL SERVER
We investigated the major players in the cloud communications space. As we reviewed all the factors that mattered—reputation, functionality, ease of use, app integrations, and of course cost savings—it became clear that RingCentral was the best partner for us.
Terry Smith
Director of IT Operations
The country’s largest provider of locum tenens healthcare services
When healthcare organizations are short-staffed and need to temporarily fill roles for doctors, nurses, or allied health professionals, they are more likely to turn to the experts at CHG Healthcare than to any other staffing company in the US.
CHG literally invented the healthcare industry’s “locum tenens” model, meaning temporary placement, and became the world’s first staffing agency to offer this service to hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare organizations. Today, CHG is the country’s largest provider of locum tenens services—filling nearly a third of all temporary healthcare roles in the US.
In 2020, the five specialty subsidiaries that make up the CHG staffing family placed more than 13,000 medical professionals around the world, providing care to more than 25 million patients.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare staffing
HQ
Midvale, UT
YEAR FOUNDED
1979
EMPLOYEES
3,000
A move to cloud telephony accelerated by COVID
Before COVID, CHG’s IT team began looking into cloud telephony solutions, planning to retire the company’s on-prem phone system at some point in the near future. But Terry Smith, Director of IT Operations, explains that the lockdowns happened so suddenly that his team had to reprioritize—and immediately deploy the softphone client from their legacy telephony system.
“Our softphone got us through that initial transition to remote work, but we realized fairly soon that it was creating workflow challenges,” says Terry. “Our employees had to VPN in, so we were having to manage our own private cloud. Everyone’s call experience was dependent on their home’s internet connections, which weren’t always sufficient to support business calls.”
An extensive app gallery leads the company to RingCentral
As Terry explains, as his team reviewed several cloud telephony solutions, they found RingCentral in the lead on several key factors—including feature set, company reputation, and the intuitiveness of the platform.
But the deciding factors, he notes, were the extensiveness of RingCentral’s open platform with the access to an app gallery and open APIs that allowed for custom workflows.
Of our 3,000 employees, about 1,800 use Salesforce. With the RingCentral for Salesforce integration, those outside sales teams have found several ways to improve their workflows: click-to-dial, the screen-pop that brings up a caller’s profile, and auto-logging, which keeps our agents from having to manually enter data into Salesforce after every call.
Terry Smith
Director of IT Operations
Another RingCentral app integration that CHG’s staff is leveraging is the RingCentral Google Chrome Extension, which lets employees click-to-dial right from their Google applications.
“We have several hundred employees in various divisions who don’t use Salesforce, as well as hundreds more whose sales teams use a different CRM altogether,” Terry explains.
What’s great about the RingCentral Chrome Extension is that we can give click-to-dial capability to everyone, not only the employees who have Salesforce accounts. In fact, even our Salesforce teams use the Chrome Extension to make calls when they’re not in their Salesforce environment.
Terry Smith
Director of IT Operations
CHG has also implemented the RingCentral for Okta integration, which allows for multi-factor authentication into the company’s RingCentral environment.
The Okta integration is valuable because it helps us provide an extra layer of security for our communications, which is particularly important in the healthcare industry.
Terry Smith
Director of IT Operations
Leveraging RingCentral’s API platform to create new efficiencies
As Terry also explains, CHG is finding several ways to use RingCentral’s APIs to develop custom workflows and improve the company’s operations.
“Our staffing teams make calls all over the country to place healthcare professionals in roles, and the laws vary by state in terms of whether or not we can record those calls. We’ve used the RingCentral API for voice to program a workflow that identifies the state of the phone number as we’re dialing, and then records only if that state allows it.”
Terry adds that CHG’s Business Intelligence department has also found a valuable use for RingCentral’s call log API.
“Our BI team wrote a replication process for our old phone system, to pull specific call data into a SQL database and give it to different departments to share insights into their teams’ performance. RingCentral’s API made it easy for the BI team to recreate that process in our new telephony environment, without having to rebuild any of their custom code.”
Discovering another benefit—significant telephony savings
Finally, Terry points out, his team recently ran projections of their anticipated telephony costs over the next few years, taking into account how the company’s migration to RingCentral will alter their telephony infrastructure and existing provider relationships. The results, he notes, yielded great news for CHG Healthcare.
“Moving our entire organization onto RingCentral is changing how we pay for telephony in several ways,” he says. “We no longer have the standard long-distance calling rates we were paying. We won’t need to buy telephony hardware anymore. And we’ll be consolidating several communication services onto RingCentral, which we’ve been paying for separately, such as video conferencing and faxing.”
The savings we expect from this migration is jaw dropping. Based on our projections, we anticipate RingCentral is going to reduce our overall telephony expenses by $600,000 in 2022 alone, and then another $500,000 the following year. I’d call that a win.
Terry Smith
Director of IT Operations