RingCentral recently enriched its partnership with two service providers by supplying contact centre capabilities for each of their portfolios. Cox Business Contact Center with RingCentral and Unified Customer Experience (UCX) with RingCentral from Spectrum Business both leverage RingCentral’s RingCX platform, which is AI-driven and omnichannel capable. Both offers complement existing unified communications (UC) offers brought to market in conjunction with RingCentral, based on its ‘RingEX’ platform, namely, Cox Business Connect with RingCentral and, from Spectrum Business, Unified Communications (UC) with RingCentral. Spectrum Business sweetens the deal by blending in a sales-oriented add-on from RingCentral to its UC offer called AI Conversation Expert (ACE), which transcribes and analyses sales calls and meetings to help close more opportunities.
The partnerships reflect the fact that vendors and service providers see the contact centre space as a key growth market. Both parties reap specific benefits from the alliances. Vendors such as RingCentral benefit by gaining access to the service providers’ customer bases, thus broadening their addressable market. Service providers benefit by expanding the portfolio of services they can provide to their customers, thereby deepening their relationship with them.
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However, making the deal practical for service providers requires an additional layer. Simply reselling the licenses that enable access to vendor platforms is economically challenging, as margins on those licences are svelte. So, service providers make it a habit of scooping additional value atop the ‘sundae’, such as offering to manage the services residing on the platforms, selling accompanying services such as voice, and providing professional services such as consulting and integration.
Irrespective of the rationales behind each party’s motivation for jumping into the fray, now is a very opportune time for them to do so. Today, organisations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections. To meet that demand, contact centres have been undergoing a profound transformation, with the concept of a ‘contact centre’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’ (CX). Contact centres are converting from featuring live agents to also including AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalised.
Given the importance of customer experience in the market and to help organisations make the transition to it, vendors such as RingCentral and service providers such as Cox Business and Spectrum Business have been rolling out a stream of contact centre capabilities and will surely continue to do so.
