RingCentral Ups Collaboration AnteRingCentral Ups Collaboration Ante

Intent on putting collaboration at the center of all things, as RingCentral COO David Sipes noted during a recent analyst briefing, the cloud communications provider today shared news on how it'll be accomplishing that within the contact center and enterprise meeting experiences.

Collaborative Contact Centers
To better enable collaboration within the contact center and between the contact center and the business, RingCentral has introduced its Collaborative Contact Center solution. The solution elevates the RingCentral Contact Center service, built on the inContact cloud contact center, by integrating with the RingCentral Glip team messaging/collaboration app as well as a new service called RingCentral Pulse.

David Sipes, RingCentral

The Glip integration not only allows seamless communications between contact center agents and subject matter experts within the business, but also enables customers to participate in the conversation as well, said John Finch, AVP of contact center product marketing, during the briefing. Participants will have RingCentral's full product suite, including video and file sharing, at their disposals, as well, he added. Ultimately, such seamlessness should help shorten time to resolution on customer issues – a big boon for any contact center operation.

With RingCentral Pulse, the company aims to further facilitate improved operations by enabling contact centers to utilize intelligent automated bots for monitoring key performance metrics in real time, Finch said. Pulse will feed automated alerts and notifications to designated Glip messaging teams, enabling real-time response as warranted.

RingCentral will be featuring Pulse demos next week in its booth (#1907) at Enterprise Connect, in Orlando, Fla. (where COO Sipes will be taking the main stage on Wednesday, March 14, at 9:00 a.m. to 9:20 a.m., for an Industry Vision Address). The company said it expects to release a Pulse beta in the second quarter.

In a prepared statement, No Jitter contributor and Enterprise Connect 2018 presenter Blair Pleasant noted the significance of tying together the contact center and business. "A good portion of support inquiries handled by contact center agents require some sort of assistance from experts in various parts of their organization," said Pleasant, who is president and principal analyst for COMMfusion. "By integrating the power of cloud-based unified communications, team messaging, and collaboration into the contact center, RingCentral enables businesses to better serve customer needs in a faster and more flexible way."

Collaborative Meetings
With its new RingCentral Collaboration Meetings solution, RingCentral aims to serve businesses that aren't quite ready to replace their PBX systems but still want quick access to meetings and collaboration spaces, said Jose Pastor, RingCentral VP of product management, during the briefing. Toward that end, the company is now offering a "supercharged" standalone version of the RingCentral Meetings for Web solution.

This amped-up Meetings app not only will support online meetings but also feature integrated team messaging (via Glip, of course), video conferencing, screen sharing, and task management. And, once a company is ready to ditch the PBX, RingCentral is offering an easy upgrade path to its UCaaS suite, RingCentral Office, Pastor said.

RingCentral Meetings is available now, in three editions: Free, Essentials ($14.99/user/month), and Advanced ($19.99/user/month).

As Sipes summarized during the briefing, these and other impending offerings are about three things: letting people work the way they want to work, enabling mobility, and not forcing behavioral change – the "work anywhere environment."

Learn more about Cloud Communications at Enterprise Connect 2018, March 12 to 15, in Orlando, Fla. Register now using the code NOJITTER to save an additional $200 off the Regular Rate or get a free Expo Plus pass.

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