Central Restaurant’s agents handle 60,000 calls a month

Whenever you go out to eat, wherever you get your food, you can thank a restaurant supply company for it. Central Restaurant Products provides equipment and supplies to kitchens and restaurants of all shapes and sizes, from school cafeterias to the Indianapolis Colts’ training facility(!), and that means they have a lot of customers to keep in touch with.

On average, they have about 60,000 calls a month, between inbound and outbound calls. So, a good business phone system is vital.

Well, getting that phone system was proving difficult. First they tried an on-premises landline solution, but that locked everyone into an office. Then they tried a cloud solution, but it couldn’t integrate with their other tools and kept dropping calls. Even then, the calls that got through had poor quality.

Nat Norris, VP of Marketing and IT at Central Restaurant Products, began looking for a new vendor. He had several specs in a retail phone system to consider, including uptime, flexibility, and support. Would attempt number three be a better solution?

“Great call quality and a huge reduction in dropped calls”

The third time was, indeed, the charm, because that’s when Central moved to Dialpad. They started using Dialpad Ai Sales Center in their contact center for their agents nationwide, both for inbound and outbound calling.

From then on, call quality was up, and downtime was, well, down.

Now, whether a caller needs a pizza oven for a specific chain, or a high-volume establishment needs dinnerware, Central can take those calls without missing a beat.

Any agent, any device, anywhere—for a nationwide contact center

When Central used an on-premises landline, there was a significant challenge: agents had to basically be at their desks all day.

Now, they can use Dialpad across different devices, operating systems, and web browsers. What does that mean? One word: mobility.

“We don’t have to be in an office anymore,” said Nat. “We can use our workstation, cell phone, or tablet, if that’s what the agents desire. We’re getting people in the most comfortable spot to do the best work possible.”

Need to step away from the desk—while still on a call? No problem, you can seamlessly flip calls between devices with a tap.

Not only has this newfound flexibility helped with remote work during the pandemic, but it’s also opened up new opportunities for hiring. Central is no longer restrained to just hiring agents near their offices—they can hire anyone from New York to New Orleans, regardless of location.

“They're onboarded pretty quickly,” said Nat. “Dialpad is very intuitive, very easy to use.”

Reporting a recipe for success

Central’s team has been able to use Dialpad to improve not only their calls, but their business practices too.

One way that Nat and the team at Central Restaurant Products use analytics is to gather important information—“what we’re doing on calls, how long we’re on them, and we can use heat maps to get smarter about things from a staffing perspective.”

Dialpad’s heat maps come built-in (you don’t need to contact a support team or get someone to pull the numbers for you), and show things like call volume patterns and average speed to answer.

Now, Nat can keep track of uptime, troubleshooting incidents, and calls. He knows that phone calls have the best conversion rates, but Dialpad even lets them connect calls to online activity.

So if, for example, a customer goes online to search for a new refrigerator, then calls in to talk to an agent before placing the order, the revenue from that call can be attributed properly to that online search. This gives Central a more accurate view of the customer journey by using information from all channels, rather than keeping each channel in its own little pen.

What’s more, every call Central’s agents make or receive come with real-time transcripts, thanks to Dialpad Ai, which can transcribe conversations (more accurately than almost all competitors out there) and even track how often keywords are spoken.

Central’s agents can now check back on old call transcripts and recordings to find historic data or use them for learning.

In fact, Dialpad Ai and analytics have provided so much data that Central has hired a new coach specifically to leverage it all. (That’s a lot of insights!)

Customize your integrations

Central Restaurant Products uses Salesforce on a daily basis, so it stands to reason they’d want a communications platform that can work with it. Well, not only does Dialpad provide a Salesforce integration, it also lets you create custom APIs. And that’s just what Central did.

“One of the things that helps our reps is being able to automate call matching between Dialpad and Salesforce,” Nat explains. “So we built a custom integration that takes advantage of the APIs and webhooks from Dialpad, brings it over to Salesforce, and gets account information quicker.”

On top of that, Central’s agents can easily see Salesforce contacts’ history with them while on a call.

This makes it easy to have all the information they need on every call, with just a click.

The result? A notable uptick in leads and improved organic growth.

Say goodbye to downtime

So, with all the mobility, insights, and analytics, has work gotten easier for Central Restaurant Products? Absolutely. For starters, work is far more efficient without having constant downtime and phone problems.

The value from eliminating technical issues and troubleshooting alone has made Dialpad worthwhile. Overall, Nat estimates efficiency has improved by around 10-15% per call, and with around 60,000 calls per month, those minutes add up. A lot.

And whenever they do need some help, Dialpad’s customer service is there, 24/7. Good support was one of the main things Nat wanted for Central’s communications platform, and they have it.

In short: less troubleshooting, more customer service.

Now, no kitchen has to worry about lacking supplies, because they can reach Central (with a little help from Dialpad).