For companies of all industries and sizes, there’s an immediate long-term effect of COVID-19 already taking shape: remote work.
The urgency and widespread scale of an office exodus sent operations teams scrambling to increase bandwidth and maintain performance for employees who need to access corporate apps and data from home—or potentially anywhere in the world.
Ring.io is uniquely suited to support such efforts. Founded in 2020 by a pair of contact center technology veterans, CEO Sam Aparicio and CTO Ashish Soni, Ring.io is a power dialer and cloud call center platform for CRM that allows users to make and receive calls from their CRM using a click to call browser extension for Google Chrome. It mobilizes inside sales teams to reach prospects outside of an office.
“We knew nothing about sales, per se, but we did understand the psyche of a sales representative,” Aparicios said. “There is a tedious processes to follow with logging a lot of information and all that can feel stifling and disempowering, so we asked, ‘Can we use technology to restore a salesperson’s sense of control over their sales cycle and enable better engagement with prospects?’”
By combining a powerful combination of Twilio APIs, including Programmable Messaging, Voice, Pay, Elastic SIP Trunking, and Voice Insights, Ring.io equips salespeople with the communications capabilities they need to save time while maximizing results.
”We’re arming them in a fight for mindshare and market share,” Aparicio said.
Aparicio first became aware of Twilio in 2010, while judging a hackathon in Washington D.C., but initially passed on Twilio’s—at the time—vastly different cloud-based contact center approach.
Years later, after dealing with frustrating and business-damaging outages, the benefits of cloud-based connectivity became clear, and Ring.io switched to Twilio.
“For a SaaS provider, you put everything on the line with what vendors you use. Functionally, price—none of that matters if you can’t rely on your partner. That’s one of Twilio’s secret weapons—it has incredible uptime,” Aparicio said.
With network reliability handled, Ring.io is able to focus on finetuning its solution to empower salespeople to build their pipeline faster, Aparicio added: “Sales shouldn’t be about clicking on things. And yet that’s what life is like for so many sales reps. After discovering that sales reps spend their lives looking at CRM screens, we knew communications needed to happen from a single pane of glass.”
To call someone from Ring.io, users can use a click-to-call web dialer from their browser via embedded Twilio Voice and Client APIs. Calls are automatically recorded and logged in the CRM, and sales reps can leave a pre-recorded voicemail with the touch of a button, as well as send SMS messages using Twilio Programmable Messaging, and schedule a follow-up call with a reminder—all from the same user interface.
“Good selling is about reaching prospects at the most appropriate time,” Aparicio said.
In addition to its call and messaging capabilities, Ring.io manages hundreds of thousands of phone numbers across multiple providers, and it uses Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking to originate phone calls from that infrastructure.
In practice, salespeople can reach anyone worldwide regardless of where they’re calling from, IP phones (phones on desks connected via broadband), softphones (software that runs on a Mac / PC) and standard PSTN phones (cell phones, landlines, existing business numbers).
For reps to more quickly run through a list of outbound calls, Ring.io’s power dialer allows users to conduct so-called dialing sessions, powered by Twilio Conference, and auto-progresses between phone calls.
It all adds up to a powerful suite of tools, all interconnected, to make salespeoples’ lives better.
“Our goal is to help salespeople have more success—saving them time and eliminating repetitive tasks—in each interaction with a prospect,” Aparicio said.
Insights play a vital role in both the customer and operational success of Ring.io. They built a monitoring system using Twilio Voice Insights API whereby sales reps with weak wifi signals receive an alert that their local network conditions aren’t good and are offered to seamlessly switch to their mobile phone or landline.
To troubleshoot broader audio quality issues, this same REST API provides an explanation about what may be going on.
Equally important as reliably connecting calls is learning from them, Aparicio said: “Sales is a team sport; it involves collaboration where teammates can listen in on a conversation to share how to answer a prospect.”
In light of COVID-19, many remote sales teams find themselves without a way to learn from each other as they’re used to. So, Ring.io built a live-monitoring capability into its platform that promotes a culture of transparency by helping teams to identify what works and scaling that knowledge. Managers and sales reps can listen into live phone calls, via Twilio Conference, and call recordings from customer accounts in their CRM.
Of all the challenges that working from home presents, few are as tricky as Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, which requires a PCI compliant hosting provider. Twilio
Built-in features also help sales reps assist in making phone payments without revealing sensitive credit card data.
Looking ahead, Aparicio said Ring.io recognizes that for many companies, remote work is here to stay. The Ring.io team plans to further extend the capabilities of its customers’ CRMs for more effective inside sales by adding video conferencing: “Video has a role to play later in the sales cycle, so we’re eager to further enhance how customers can expedite closing deals.”