Aerial image of the home of the San Diego Symphony

How the San Diego Symphony orchestrates an elite patron experience

San Diego Symphony logo
Region
Americas
Company size
100–399
Industry
Sports & Entertainment
Products used
Customer Experience logo
Business Communications logo
KEY METRICS
8x
savings using RingCX to eliminate
third-party call centers for overflow
95%
decrease in in hold time after deploying RingCX for box office agents
3x
increase in efficiency and business insights with RingEX and RingCX

Overview

The San Diego Symphony struggled with a fragmented legacy infrastructure that forced patrons into four-hour hold queues and required expensive third-party overflow support. By migrating to RingCX and RingEX, the organization unified its waterfront and indoor venues, slashed wait times to under 10 minutes, and gained the internal efficiency needed to eliminate costly outsourcing contracts. This digital shift ensures their world-class musical performances are matched by a seamless, professional service experience.
Our legacy system could leave a caller on hold for four hours. With RingCX, even during times with high call volume, nobody waits for more than 10 minutes. That’s a 95% decrease in hold time.
Sean Kennedy
IT Director

About our customer

San Diego Symphony has delivered world-class cultural impact and musical excellence since 1910. The organization performs for over 250,000 people annually across its landmark Jacobs Music Center and the waterfront Rady Shell.

The challenge: Fragmented tools and multi-hour delays

The symphony’s expansion to a second major outdoor venue—The Rady Shell, located on the San Diego waterfront—pushed the organization’s aging, rigid phone system to a breaking point. IT leadership lacked any visibility into call data, leaving them unable to track performance or make simple administrative adjustments without relying on a slow-moving external provider. This technical debt created significant friction for both staff and music lovers.
 
  • Extreme wait times: A system glitch frequently trapped callers in infinite loops, resulting in long hold times that lasted up to four hours.
  • Operational silos: Communication between the historic indoor hall and the new waterfront location was disconnected, making it difficult to manage surging call volumes.
  • Financial inefficiency: Lack of visibility into overall call volume and individual agent performance left the symphony with no choice but to pay a fortune for third-party overflow call centers, especially during peak season.

The solution and ROI: A high-fidelity communication strategy

To resolve the limitations of their legacy infrastructure, the San Diego Symphony moved to a cloud environment powered by RingEX for business communications and the RingCX contact center for box office agents and other patron-facing calls. By trading manual service hurdles for a transparent, data-driven platform, they elevate the guest experience and reclaim lost operational budget.
 
  • RingCX reduces hold times by 95%—ensuring no caller waits more than 10 minutes—by utilizing intelligent routing and an intuitive admin dashboard.
  • RingCX generates an 8x savings in telecommunication costs by providing the reporting depth necessary to bring overflow operations back in-house and cancel expensive third-party contracts.
  • RingCX slashes call abandonment rates to near zero through the deployment of automated callbacks, voicemail options, and recorded FAQ menus.
  • RingEX and RingCX lead to a 3x increase in efficiency and business insights across the organization.
  • The RingCentral App, which lets employees access RingEX from their mobile devices, unifies the marketing and venue operations teams by allowing staff to coordinate with vendors from any location, while enhancing fundraising operations by allowing gift officers to use their official symphony business numbers on personal devices, maintaining professional continuity with donors.
RingCX dashboard with ongoing call rendition.

What’s next for the San Diego Symphony

Following the successful rollout across their box office and development teams, Sean Kennedy and his team are focused on driving total organization-wide adoption of the RingEX and RingCX solutions. IT leadership is currently exploring deeper integrations between RingCentral and the team’s standard productivity tools using both existing integrations on the RingCentral App Gallery as well as the RingCentral Open Platform to create custom, tailored workflows with RingCentral’s APIs. This technological evolution ensures that a cultural institution with over a century of history remains at the forefront of modern guest engagement.
To learn more about our customer, visit the San Diego Symphony.