CASE STUDIES

RACS

(Refugee Advice & Casework Service)

Overview

Industry

Nonprofit, Legal

Location

Sydney

Company size 

Mid-sized 

Year founded

1987

Key Outcomes

• Highly available, secure platform supporting business-critical voice channel.

• No impact on users or change management required during transition.

• Visibility and reporting for business insights and better decision-making.

• Flexible licensing model to meet changing business circumstances..

• Access to AI-enabled features for future business and operational improvements.



“Reliance has been very responsive. They keep us updated on what is going on.”

Dan Wright, Head of Technology, RACS

In 2025, RACS responded to more than 11,000 requests for legal help. The majority of these were phone calls, initially triaged by a team of volunteers before being followed up by RACS lawyers. Despite the criticality of these calls, RACS’s Microsoft Teams Direct Routing managed service was prone to unexpected outages with no call reporting or statistics available to inform the management team. Also, telephony costs per month varied by up to 400%, based on usage. “Depending on the month and the caseload, our volumes can fluctuate massively. We were also receiving different invoices from our managed services provider with different charges every month that weren’t very clear. On top of no call visibility or reporting, that made it really hard for us to forecast costs accurately,” said Dan Wright, Head of Technology, RACS.

Cost savings, reliability and flexibility

Looking to improve telephony, RACS selected a managed RingCentral RingEX service from Reliance Communications from a shortlist of three solutions.

“Reliance put together a great proposal, they were very responsive and demonstrated that they deeply understood our requirements and the technology we needed,” said Wright.

The decision to choose RingCentral was based on a number of factors, particularly strong local testimonials, and the high quality and 99.999% availability of the platform, backed by top security certifications and local data retention to comply with RACS’s data sovereignty obligations.

Cost and the flexibility to easily scale the service up and down were also key factors in the decision. An added bonus was RingCentral’s integrated secure online fax services, allowing RACS to terminate its costly third party fax provider.

“We’ve halved our telephony costs in moving to Reliance and RingCentral. Now it’s one monthly invoice, and we know exactly what we are paying for. That allows me to go to the leadership team and the board and say we’re going to be paying $X per month for telephony, and that cost will not fluctuate, unless we need to increase or decrease licences,” said Wright.

As a nonprofit, RACS’s operations are dependent on securing new grants and funding, so having the capacity to manage ongoing costs is critical. RingCentral’s licensing model allowed RACS to structure its contract to dial the service up or down without being locked into a longterm, fixed price.

“We’ve halved our telephony costs in moving to Reliance and RingCentral.”

Dan Wright, Head of Technology, RACS

“Downtime for us is very key, but the porting process during the cutover was seamless; everyone got their number transferred across with no issues.” 

Dan Wright
Head of Technology, RACS

A seamless transition

Moving to RingCentral has been a seamless transition for RACS’s hybrid workforce, with the RingCentral Microsoft Teams embedded agent installed in the background on users’ devices. There was no change for staff in the way they work or use Microsoft Teams, apart from a one-off requirement for users to log on to RingCentral before that was incorporated as part of their single sign-on.

Reliance managed the transition for RACS from initial design and architecture, through to number porting and cutover, and now supports ongoing operations, including all changes and troubleshooting on the RingCentral platform. The cutover took place during RACS’s Christmas closedown period to minimise any potential staff or client impact.

“Reliance has been very responsive. They keep us updated on what is going on. Downtime for us is very key, but the porting process during the cutover was seamless; everyone got their number transferred across with no issues,” said Wright.

RingCentral’s reporting has given RACS visibility into daily call volumes, missed calls and peak demand periods. This new level of insight provides the leadership team with data‑driven evidence to better inform funding and resourcing decisions, and provides a baseline for continuous improvement as RACS refines its operations over time.

An AI-powered future

Wright says that “having a phone system that just works without downtime is all I care about at the moment.” That said, he is excited by the potential of RingCentral’s AI-powered features, particularly its free transcription software – a core feature of RingEX. The RACS team hasn’t used transcription services internally, so Wright plans to run a trial with a small pilot group first before rolling it out across the organisation.

“Lawyers are cautiously optimistic about AI and I think the transcription service could be quite useful. It will save us a lot of time if we can transcribe the call then just copy and paste that into our client management system, or even push it straight into our CMS.” said Wright.

Tools selected:

• RingCentral RingEX

• RingCentral for Microsoft Teams