Every year, the U.S. government sets aside over $150 billion in tax credits and incentives to businesses, but only 2% of eligible small businesses actually take advantage of the credit. That leaves $146 billion sitting in bank accounts, just waiting to be claimed. It’s not that they don’t want or need the money, it’s that businesses don’t know it exists. With over 3,000 tax credits available, it’s impossible for most companies and even tax professionals to keep track of them all. That’s where OnCentive comes in.
"We make sure businesses of all sizes can take advantage of the very complicated tax credits that the government is giving out," says Chris Wright, president of OnCentive, which has helped hundreds of businesses claim over $1.5 billion in tax credits.
"OpenPhone is almost like Slack for phone numbers."
Chris Wright
OnCentive works with businesses over the phone to support them through the tax credit qualification process and then helps those businesses to actually claim those credits. Previously, OnCentive used Nextiva for their business phone service, which Chris describes as a traditional VoIP system with a legacy-style network setup.
When Chris joined the company in 2021, he immediately identified the communications issues caused by their outdated VoIP phone system.
Chris Wright
Chris’s team members each had their own phone number to communicate with clients, however, due to the traditional setup, communication between departments was difficult and information was siloed. Different teams of people at OnCentive work on qualifying businesses for different credits. Once qualified by the sales team, those accounts are handed over to the operations team to process the credit application.
Nextiva made it possible for OnCentive to give teams working on different credits their own unique phone numbers, but the handoff from sales to operations was still painful.
"[Customer communication] wasn’t stored in one central location," says Chris, "and other people can’t see your communications easily."
Those communication challenges led some OnCentive’s employees to continue using their personal phones to conduct business — which introduced further challenges. "We had clients calling people at nine o’clock at night or four o’clock in the morning just to ask us questions," recalls Chris of life under the old system.
What they needed was a reliable, central resource for communication to and from the company. Wright turned to OpenPhone, which he was familiar with from a previous company.
"OpenPhone is almost like Slack for phone numbers," says Chris. With OpenPhone, different sales teams focused on the complexities of specific tax credits still have their own shared number that anyone on the team can answer. But now they can also communicate internally on those sales conversations and then pass the complete communications history for each qualified client over to the operations team.
"The ability to see what everyone is doing and share communications actively and being able to tag teammates within a conversation that’s only internal is very nice," says Chris. "For everyone to have visibility into what’s going on, I think that’s probably the biggest thing that OpenPhone solves."
Using OpenPhone keeps all the teams at OnCentive aligned. Collaborating on customer communications within a shared inbox dedicated to a specific phone number breaks client calls out of the silos they were in previously and allows team members to easily share information with each other.
And what about keeping business on business phones?
Now the team gets far fewer calls at random hours because they give out their OpenPhone numbers instead of their personal numbers.
"Thankfully now we have office hours,” says Chris. “Simple things that are very intuitive that you’d think would be readily available but just aren’t as easy to implement as they should be — but they are with OpenPhone."
OpenPhone packages a powerful shared communications platform in an easy-to-use platform that helps OnCentive simplify and streamline their customer calls and keep everyone in the loop.
Join thousands of businesses already using OpenPhone to communicate better with their customers.
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OpenPhone was issued a successful SOC 2 report and is actively monitored by Vanta.