The Doctor
Learn how this fresh, modern take on the doctor's office leverages RingEX and RingCX to streamline its operations, deliver an outstanding patient experience, and power rapid growth.
VGM Group
This national leader in post-acute healthcare uses RingCentral’s AI tools to streamline workflows, improve efficiency, and enhance the customer experience.
Region
Americas
Company size
400–4,999
Industry
Healthcare
Products used
RingCentral’s AI Receptionist has added incredible efficiencies to our operations. Our early test runs with the AI proved so impressive, in fact, that we’re now planning to roll it out to all departments across the company.
Tina Blitsch
Digital Contact Center Solutions Analyst
Award-winning healthcare business partner
The many business units that comprise VGM Group collectively serve tens of thousands of companies throughout the US and Canada, in industries as wide ranging as home medical equipment, physical therapy, insurance, restaurants, and in-home care. Just a partial list of the business services VGM offers includes group purchasing, online education, fulfillment services, insurance, media, and marketing.
VGM Group’s stellar reputation is reflected in the organization’s numerous industry awards, including Iowa’s Top Workplace, the Employee-Owned Company of the Year, and 2024’s Info-Tech CIO Award for VGM’s CIO Jeremy Kauten.
Take a quick tour of RingCentral
VGM Group chooses Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader RingCentral
Every day, thousands of businesses count on VGM Group to deliver mission-critical products, services, logistics, or other support to power their operations. Just one of the company’s many business units, VGM & Associates, is the largest member service organization in the US for post-acute care providers, serving more than 3,500 providers in 9,000 locations across the country. With such a high volume of customers, vendors, and partners, VGM Group’s IT and Customer Service teams realized they needed a more modern, flexible, and sophisticated communications solution than their legacy on-prem system.
“Our HOMELINK business unit alone takes about 28,000 calls each month, and our Fulfillment Center fields about 20,000 emails monthly,” explains Tina Blitsch, VGM Group’s Digital Contact Center Solutions Analyst. “We needed a more cohesive cloud-based system to help our Customer Success agents be as efficient as possible while giving our customers a consistently excellent experience.”
That objective led VGM Group to investigate cloud communication providers. “We vetted several providers on our own and found RingCentral’s platform the most flexible, comprehensive, and impressive,” says Stacy Palmer, VGM Group’s Director of Communication Services. “Then we turned to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which we rely on heavily for procurement decisions. And not surprisingly, we found RingCentral as a Leader there as well.”
We use every bit of RingCentral functionality we can: business phone, contact center, messaging, video conferencing, even RingCentral’s Advanced SMS Inbox.
Stacy Palmer
,
Director of Communication Services
RingCentral AI tools unleash major workflow improvements
Stacy notes that the company is seeing significant workflow improvements with RingCentral AI Receptionist. “We rolled out the AI Receptionist first to our Help Desk team. That small group manages a high volume of calls and was happy to be our internal pilot. It’s really impressive how much the AI has helped successfully offload those agents of calls that can be handled and transferred automatically. We’ve been so pleased with the results, in fact, that we’re now planning to push AI Receptionist out to more business units.”
Our AI Receptionist test run was excellent. We customized some verbiage for the AI to listen for, and it was able to reliably answer many callers’ questions and, when needed, transfer calls to the right people.
Stacy Palmer
,
Director of Communication Services
As Tina adds, VGM Group has also significantly improved operations across the company using various AI tools available in their RingCentral environment. “With the AI Agent in our Contact Center, our HOMELINK team has been able to automate outreach to make sure patients are scheduling appointments, reminding them of upcoming appointments, and helping schedule follow-up visits. This initiative is saving that business unit tremendous time. In fact, we’re now planning to deploy the AI Agent to help our Fulfillment Center realize similar savings.”
More efficiencies with RingCentral’s Advanced SMS Inbox
Antonia Borggreen, Talent Acquisition Partner, adds that RingCentral improves an important workflow for her at VGM Group’s Fulfillment Centers.
“At any time, we might have 25 open roles at our four Fulfillment Center locations, in Tennessee, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. I’m managing all of those candidates’ hiring processes. To keep these people updated on application status, interviews, and start dates, I used to manually text each person, sometimes dozens of SMS messages a day. Thanks to RingCentral’s Advanced SMS Inbox, I can send an unlimited amount of text messages for upcoming interviews and onboarding. I can also easily send templated messages or bulk texts to several people at once, and I never need to manually type in the message itself or the person’s number.”
Antonia also notes that she saves additional time with specific, helpful features in the solution. “Instead of having to scroll through each message to figure out where we are, I can just add a little dated note that stays at the top of the SMS thread. That way, when I’m communicating with a candidate or a new-hire, I can instantly see exactly what our last contacts were about. That saves me a lot of time and hassle all by itself.”
I’m communicating with 15 to 30 people a day, and I can automate much of the SMS process. So I’d say the Advanced SMS Inbox saves me a day and a half per week. It’s also less costly than our old texting tool.
Antonia Borggreen
,
Talent Acquisition Partner
70,000
calls handled by RingCentral Contact Center’s AI Agent in six months
100%
of departments planning for AI Receptionist after early successes
12 hours
saved each week by HR manager using the Advanced SMS Inbox
Planning future growth with RingCentral
As Stacy explains, both the Communications and Customer Success teams at VGM Group have been pleased with the workflow improvements they’ve been able to create using RingCentral’s many capabilities. “We’re benefiting from the business phone system, the Advanced SMS Inbox, the Contact Center, and of course the AI tools,” she says. “Some of my teams even use RingCentral Video to walk customers through setting up our products, and that has been extremely helpful.”
VGM Group is creating so many operational improvements with RingCentral, in fact, that Stacy says her team has plans to take advantage of even more of the platform’s functionality.
“My team is looking forward to rolling out the RingCentral Workflow Builder design tool to create automated workflows for things like our out-of-office replies,” she says. “We’re also exploring the beta for the RingCentral Hubspot integration. And the big rollout we’re planning now is the AI Receptionist implementation across the company. That’s going to have huge implications on efficiencies and time savings for many of our business units.”
Finally, Stacy adds, her next planned RingCentral rollout is for the AI Receptionist to help reduce the front-desk team’s live call volume. “We’ll be rolling out AI Receptionist soon so callers can easily be directed to various groups throughout the organization without needing our Director of First Impressions to answer each call. This should allow her to better assist clients as they enter the building or need help with other tasks.”
Based on what she has seen of AI Receptionist’s capabilities and the early successes her team has experienced in its early implementations, Stacy anticipates seeing quantifiable and significant operational improvements. “Because we receive a lot of calls to our Director of First Impressions queue each day and we have limited staff to answer them, we’re finding many of those calls abandoned. We’re very excited about the prospect of AI Receptionist automatically answering and routing those 40% to 45% of the calls we’ve been losing each day.”
RingCentral has consistently proven a great partner. They listen. They’re responsive. And they continuously put out innovative functionality, especially the AI tools. That’s how I know this will be a long-term partnership.
Stacy Palmer
,
Director of Communication Services
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