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ECHO Incorporated: From a 2009 ShoreTel to a Modern Cloud Contact Center

Worldwide outdoor power equipment manufacturer ECHO Incorporated migrates 650+ users from an end-of-life ShoreTel system to RingCentral UCaaS and Contact Center — gaining mobile flexibility, advanced analytics, and a contact center platform built for growth.

The Challenge

ECHO Incorporated's ShoreTel PBX, installed in 2009, had reached end of life — generating call quality issues, limiting mobile access, and providing no meaningful contact center analytics for a growing customer support operation.

The Solution

CTPros guided ECHO through a cloud platform evaluation, executed a phased RingCentral rollout across 6 locations, and implemented RingCentral Contact Center — transforming how ECHO's customer support team operates.

About ECHO Incorporated

ECHO Incorporated is a worldwide leader in manufacturing professional-grade, hand-held outdoor power equipment — chainsaws, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, and other landscaping tools found in Home Depot stores throughout North America and Mexico. Headquartered in Lake Zurich, Illinois, ECHO operates across six locations in Illinois, California, Arizona, and Florida, with 2,595 employees and both a dealer/retail customer support operation and a consumer support division handling end-user product questions.

An Aging ShoreTel System and a Contact Center Running Blind

Christopher Everson, ECHO's Infrastructure Manager, inherited a ShoreTel PBX installed in 2009 — and by the time he started evaluating a replacement, the system was showing its age in every direction. Call quality issues had surfaced. Scaling the platform across multiple locations was increasingly difficult. And the company had grown well past what the original deployment was designed to support.

The mobile situation was equally limiting. Company-issued cell phones were the standard — a model that was becoming harder to justify as new hires balked at carrying two devices. The existing system had no mobile app, no way to give employees a work number they could use from a personal phone, and no path to the flexibility a modern workforce expected.

On the contact center side, ECHO's customer support team was operating with minimal insight. Basic call queues routed calls, but agents had little visibility into who was calling or what they'd called about before. Managers had minimal reporting — no granular data on call volumes, agent performance, or queue metrics. For an organization handling two distinct customer segments (dealers and distributors on one side, end consumers on the other), that visibility gap was a real operational limitation.

CTPros had been ECHO's Mitel support partner since 2018. With COVID accelerating the timeline and an Arizona location experiencing severe call quality issues, ECHO moved quickly — and leaned on that established relationship to guide the transition.

CTPros Launched ECHO's RingCentral System at Sonic Speed

CTPros helped ECHO identify its specific communications requirements across customer service and support departments, then performed a full audit of the existing PBX environment. The hardware upgrades required to stay on-premise were too extensive to justify, and a cloud contact center was the clear path forward.

The rollout started in Arizona — the location experiencing the most acute call quality issues. Nicole Brusich, CTPros Technical Account Manager, handled the implementation directly. Planning and implementation for just under 100 users, including voice, chat, and video, took approximately one week. ECHO was so impressed with the speed and quality of the rollout that they immediately expanded the project to headquarters in Illinois and then to additional locations in California and Florida. In all, over 650 users were migrated to RingCentral Office and RingCentral Contact Center.

CTPros provided training throughout — introducing unified tools across departments and driving a high initial adoption rate.

Better Calls, Better Data, and a Contact Center Built for What's Next

The move to RingCentral delivered across every dimension of ECHO's communications environment.

For the broader workforce, the shift to BYOD via the RingCentral mobile app was immediate — new hires no longer receive company cell phones. Instead, ECHO provides a monthly data stipend and employees use the app on their personal devices. Work number stays private. Call quality is consistent. The program essentially pays for itself compared to issuing corporate devices.

For the contact center, the transformation was more fundamental. Agents now have visibility into who's calling before they pick up — customer history, prior call context, and queue data that simply didn't exist with the ShoreTel system. Managers have granular reporting on agent performance, call volumes, and queue metrics. The platform also eliminated Cisco WebEx, consolidating everything onto RingCentral and cutting another monthly contract.

Beyond what was already in place, ECHO was actively building toward video-assisted support — the ability to switch a consumer support call to a video session so agents can visually guide customers through equipment troubleshooting in real time. A capability that didn't exist before and is now on the roadmap.

ECHO also began evaluating whether the contact center team needed to be on-site at all — something that was never a conversation before RingCentral made fully remote contact center operations possible.

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