Envera Systems
RingCentral Video Helps This Top Residential Security Company Keep its Customers Safer and Save Money
250,000+
CALLS PLACED BY SUPPORT AGENTS EACH MONTH
5
YEARS ON RINGCENTRAL’S PLATFORM—WITH ZERO PHONE DOWNTIME
Because RingCentral Video works anywhere, we can have a field tech on their mobile phone at one of our neighborhoods, sharing a live video of an access panel or security camera. It’s like a real-time troubleshooting session, and it definitely helps us solve problems faster.
Elliot Hamby
Network Manager
Securing hundreds of thousands of homes, 24/7
For residential communities, particularly those with elderly residents, a security firm monitoring the area around the clock adds both a layer of protection and much-needed peace of mind. But most neighborhoods, including many gated communities, can’t afford full-time onsite guard staff. Fortunately for these communities, there is a solution: the technology-based security provider Envera Systems.
Envera invented an ingenious, web-based security platform called the Virtual Gate Guard. The solution combines onsite access controls and video surveillance with licensed guards looking after the neighborhood remotely. From monitoring video, to verifying visitors, to coordinating with police, Envera helps communities protect their property and loved ones effectively—and at a fraction of what it costs for full-time onsite staff.
The company’s unique service has proven so popular with HOAs, property managers, condo associations, and real estate developers that for several years in a row, the Florida Community Association Journal has named Envera a “Diamond Winner for Safety and Security” in the publication’s annual Readers’ Choice Awards.
Today, more than a thousand residential neighborhoods—comprising hundreds of thousands of residents—entrust their security to Envera’s team of Virtual Guards. But with the security of those customers largely dependent on reliable communications, Envera had to retire its legacy telephony system.
INDUSTRY
Professional &
Consumer Services
HQ
Coconut Creek, FL
YEAR FOUNDED
2007
EMPLOYEES
350
When communications uptime literally means safety and security
Network Manager Elliot Hamby explains that several issues with Envera’s previous telecommunications infrastructure were increasingly threatening the company’s ability to protect its customers.
“We’re in Florida, where hurricanes are a regular threat to communications,” Elliot says. “Our phone system consisted of an onsite PBX running connections through a local carrier. When they had an outage, our phones could be down for an entire day. With thousands of calls to make each day to our residents, we just couldn’t afford that.”
Because the phone system didn’t offer redundancy, the company’s contact center team would have to get creative during downtimes—often trying to call residents from personal cell phones. “As the security firm for our customers, we wanted them to recognize our phone numbers to ensure they’d pick up,” explains Elliot. “But when our agents called from another number, the resident would never know it was us.”
With these and other challenges—including an increasingly failure-prone PBX—Elliot and his team went looking for a cloud communications solution to manage Envera’s telephony environment. The all-in-one RingCentral platform, combined with the flexibility and configurability of each solution, made RingCentral Envera’s clear choice.
RingCentral’s cloud solution ensures reliable communications
Deploying RingCentral has led to many operational improvements, Elliot notes, but the most immediate and urgent was to finally give Envera a communications platform that its contact center agents—and the company’s customers—could count on.
“With all of our telephony in the cloud now, we’re not at risk from a phone carrier’s local outages,” he says. “Plus, no matter where our agents are calling from—their computers, desk phones, or mobile phones—our customers always see the familiar numbers because RingCentral lets us call using those numbers from any device.”
We had a big office for call center operations with expensive ISDN lines. With RingCentral Contact Center, we don’t need any of that anymore, because our staff can work anywhere. RingCentral is going to save us a lot of money.
Elliot Hamby
Network Manager
A better call center solution means better service for residents
When they migrated to RingCentral Contact Center, Envera’s customer support department discovered many ways to improve efficiency and the customer experience. “Our call center supervisors can easily monitor agent performance on things like time to answer, average call duration, and they can pull recorded calls for monitoring or training,” says Elliot.
As Elliot also points out, Envera has improved workflows by integrating RingCentral Contact Center with other apps. “With the RingCentral Salesforce integration, when a resident in one of our communities calls in to our support center, the agent gets a screen-pop showing who the customer is and if they have any outstanding support issues with us.”
Envera also leveraged RingCentral’s open API platform to set up bulk High Volume SMS texting capability, which the company uses literally thousands of times a day. “Anytime we let an approved visitor enter one of our communities, we’re able to automatically send a text notice to that resident,” says Elliot. “The amount of time that automation saves us is amazing.”
In fact, Elliot points out, as thrilled as his team was to move several communication functions—phone, video, contact center—onto a single platform, they did not realize at first that Envera’s RingCentral solution could also include High Volume SMS.
“We were using another texting vendor, but they started having service issues,” he says. “That’s when we realized RingCentral also offered High Volume SMS integrated into the rest of the platform, and we were able to move yet another communication service our staff uses every day onto RingCentral.”
The right video platform keeps the company connected and effective
RingCentral Video has also proven invaluable at improving Envera’s operations. Perhaps most important, the video conferencing app helps the team resolve technical issues at customer sites more quickly.
“Say a field tech goes to one of our communities to check on an issue with a camera or the front-gate access panel, and he needs help. Instead of just trying to explain the problem over the phone, now he can literally show us live on his cell phone, using RingCentral Video. It’s like a real-time troubleshooting session, and it definitely helps us solve problems faster.”
Additionally, when the lockdowns began and Envera’s employees had to transition to remote work, Elliot let everyone know they had access to RingCentral Video and could use it for team discussions or meetings with customers anytime.
RingCentral Video has been huge for keeping us feeling like a team while we’ve been remote. Facial expressions, body language, a coworker laughing—those make all the difference in maintaining a sense of teamwork, and you can’t see them in a text.
Elliot Hamby
Network Manager