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unified app replacing separate services for phone, video, and SMS texting
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downtime issues since migrating the entire company to RingCentral
I’m seeing the same story play out in different ways across Modern Litho: we’re all operating far more efficiently and productively since we migrated from our analog phone system to RingCentral.
Jeff Davidson
President
Providing high-quality printing services for nearly 100 years
When they need high-quality printing — for jobs ranging from marketing collateral to direct mail pieces to professional-caliber magazines and catalogs — businesses across the United States turn to the experts at Modern Litho.
Serving the print needs of businesses, nonprofits, and other entities continuously since 1937, Modern Litho has become the go-to print shop for organizations nationwide and has earned a reputation as a premier printer of specialized publications for niche markets.
The company has also earned many industry awards, including a place on Publishing Executive’s “Top 20 Magazine Publishers” list and the Bell & Howell list of “Top 200 Direct Mail Companies.”
An analog phone system undermined efficiency
Jeff Davidson, President of Modern Litho, explains that for many years the company’s communications depended on a traditional analog telephony environment. The shortcomings of that environment, Jeff says, created many challenges for the company’s operations.
“We have five locations across Missouri, and using old-fashioned phone systems at each one made it difficult for us to feel like a unified team. You’d have to dial the full number — area code included — whenever you wanted to reach someone in another office. And sometimes you’d get that office’s receptionist, and you’d think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to bother our receptionist over this. I just need to ask someone a simple question.’”
Another challenge with the old phone system, Jeff notes, was its lack of useful functionality. “We had no reporting data, so we could never get a sense of call volume or trends or how many calls our sales and customer service reps were making or answering. And because there were no intuitive administrative controls, we had to call the phone company anytime we wanted to update the IVR or make other small changes.”
RingCentral delivers app consolidation and team mobility
Migrating to the cloud-based RingCentral, Jeff explains, proved to be an excellent strategic decision for Modern Litho — for several reasons.
During COVID, we were using many tools and paying for them separately: our phone services, licenses for voicemail-to-email, and another vendor for video conferencing. It was costly and inefficient. With RingCentral, every employee now has all of those capabilities — plus others — on a single app they can access anywhere.
Jeff Davidson
President
In addition to the convenience and cost savings of consolidating communications onto a unified platform, Jeff notes that RingCentral makes it easy for Modern Litho’s employees to stay connected and accessible from anywhere.
“Before RingCentral, we were mostly limited to either having our business calls at our desks or giving out personal cell numbers — something our sales and customer service reps often had to do. Now we all have a unique number and internal extension and can make or receive business calls and SMS texts from any device.”
One of his sales teams’ favorite RingCentral features, Jeff adds, is Call Flip. “Our reps love that they can change devices mid-call — say, from their office phone to the RingCentral mobile app on their cell phone — without interrupting the call at all. That’s just one example of how RingCentral is helping to make us more mobile and flexible in how we work.”
INDUSTRY
Printing services
HQ
Jefferson City, MO
YEAR FOUNDED
1937
EMPLOYEES
330
RingCentral Video creates valuable new efficiencies
Modern Litho has also found creative ways to leverage the built-in RingCentral Video to make key workflows more efficient and to improve the customer experience.
When you’re on the phone with a customer, sometimes it’s easier to show them what you’re working on than to explain it. Now that we have RingCentral Video right on the app, we can open up a video call in real-time. That’s so powerful both for making sure we’re on the same page as our customers and for providing them a better experience.
Jeff Davidson
President
As Jeff also explains, his team has found RingCentral Video to be invaluable in speeding and improving the repairs of the company’s printing equipment.
“Say one of our large printing machines has a problem, and someone at the plant calls us here at headquarters. In the past, I’d have to send a technician out there to inspect it. But now, the employee can just open a RingCentral Video call and show us what’s happening. We can often figure out what the problem is from that video call alone —and how to get it fixed. That saves us time, minimizes equipment downtime, and makes everyone’s lives easier.”
One of the great surprises of RingCentral is that it’s so intuitive and easy to administer, it actually removes an obstacle to our growth and expansion. Our old phone system made onboarding new employees difficult. But with RingCentral, Modern Litho can continue to grow at our pace knowing that we can get new team members up and running from a communications standpoint right away.
Jeff Davidson
President