C&S Wholesale Grocers Facilitates Mobile Workforce

C&S Wholesale Grocers Inc., the largest wholesale grocery supply company in the United States, has teamed with RingCentral Inc., a provider of global enterprise cloud communications, collaboration and contact center solutions, to support its growing remote and distributed workforce and increase customer engagement.

With more than 45 locations across the country, Keene, N.H.-based C&S needed a cloud communications solution that improves mobility, aids employee collaboration and integrates with other cloud business applications. C&S is implementing RingCentral for 5,000-plus employees in almost every U.S. state.

C&S supplies 7,700-plus independent supermarkets, chain stores, military bases and institutions. In the past few years, it has acquired multiple businesses to boost its offerings, which currently number more than 137,000 products. This has caused the wholesaler to amass various legacy on-premises communications systems in different parts of the country, impeding employee productivity and creating headaches for IT as the company scaled its mobile and remote workforce.

“We are always looking for ways to improve our solutions to enable more productivity and support our future growth needs around mobility, as well as integration of our other business applications,” noted George Dramalis, C&S’ CIO. “We needed a unified solution that included messaging, calling, video meetings, conferencing and contact center. RingCentral enabled us to drive more alignment, as their cloud solution was the most comprehensive.”

Added Anthony Lobosco, VP of sales and marketing at Downington, Pa.-based Livtech, the RingCentral partner that arranged the solution: “Many of our enterprise clients, like C&S, are making the move to cloud communications to enhance productivity and empower their mobile workforce to work the way they want, with collaboration and teamwork being at the core of the experience. We’re witnessing a lot of growth and interest in unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS), and more often than not, our clients come to us requesting the full RingCentral solution. Their robust capabilities around voice, collaboration and omnichannel are well suited for our enterprise clients, and we see this trend continuing to build.”

Key RingCentral features include the following:

• Better mobility: C&S employees can use the RingCentral mobile capabilities to communicate and collaborate on the go, using them to organize a video chat, launch a conference call or swap message with colleagues in different states.
• Open platform: The RingCentral Connect Platform has 3,000-plus certified integrations, and the platform provides plenty of APIs so C&S can integrate communications services into its other business apps.
• Administrative oversight: Role-based access was a priority allows platform administrators to create custom roles to control what various users can do on the platform without giving them full administrative access. Further, C&S’s IT team can centrally monitor communications quality and track usage metrics through RingCentral’s real-time dashboard.

“Innovative enterprises like C&S Wholesale Grocers are rethinking their communications infrastructure to take their business to the next level,” said Carson Hostetter, SVP of worldwide field sales at Belmont, Calif.-based RingCentral. “We’re proud to partner with C&S to enable greater employee collaboration and customer engagement with our cloud communications solution, and we look forward to supporting their future business initiatives.”