Parkerville charity embraces digital transformation with RingCentral platform

Parkerville Children and Youth Care, a Western Australian care provider servicing families and young people, has moved towards a unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) platform that will be managed internally. They have transitioned from a third-party service to RingCentral's native cloud platform, marking an essential milestone in their digital transformation. The charity forecasts that by the close of the 2024 financial year, they will have eradicated all IT infrastructure hardware in favour of more innovative and efficient digital solutions.

Having been in service for more than 120 years, Parkerville provides a host of services, including therapeutic services, advocacy centres, and education and training programmes. The organisation operates across 20-some locations in Western Australia. Before the adoption of RingCentral, the charity used a Cisco Meraki cloud-managed secure SD-WAN for their site connectivity and had a managed Microsoft Teams service for unified communications. That previous arrangement enjoyed less than favourable results, mostly involving invisible audio on external Teams voice calls.

Parkerville's IT Manager, Tony Kartono, said, "Every time we had a problem with Teams, it was two jumps; we had to coordinate with our managed services provider, who then had to coordinate with their providers. It could take up to three weeks for the problem to be resolved." The newly integrated solution sidesteps such inconveniences, as all troubleshooting and support for the service are now maintained in-house.

The move towards UCaaS will not result in additional expenses for Parkerville, but will instead present them with a more reliable platform loaded with features. Kartono described the change as positive, stating, "We've picked up a lot more features with RingCentral without having to pay more for them." The charity has also noted the ease of configuring and managing the system's settings and functions such as out-of-office messages, auto attendant functions, hunt groups and IVRs.

The switch to RingCentral has not completely displaced Teams, with the internal collaboration still occurring on this platform. The RingCentral App for Microsoft Teams is now used by all staff members, excluding reception, who now communicate from the familiar Teams interface despite the underlying service. This has helped transmit the change throughout the organisation with minimal disruption.

Moreover, Parkerville is set to capitalise on the innovative technology that RingCentral offers. The platform will play a crucial role in shaping the future of the organisation, particularly in enhancing client experiences (CX). Kartono shared, "We are looking into RingCentral analytics to generate reporting for the business on our call volumes and activities, average time to answer, peak calling times, calls missed or abandoned, and more."

The charity is looking to combine RingCentral with Microsoft Dynamics 365, which they currently use as their client management system. The integration will allow for automatic logging of client calls. They are also considering capitalising on RingCentral's AI and voice analytics capabilities to enhance services further. These steps, however, depend on establishing a strong information governance framework first.