RingCentral announced a bouillabaisse of new and upcoming AI enhancements to its platform.
The proverbial ‘stew’ derives its flavour primarily from contact centre capabilities but also blends in sales support and team collaboration features. Together they provide organisations with valuable insight across their business operations.
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Although the capabilities draw heavily on the contact centre space, RingCentral has not forgotten its bread-and-butter business of team collaboration. Two examples illustrate the point: an AI virtual assistant generates summaries of calls and meetings, and an AI writer helps draft, refine, and translate communications across multiple languages.
RingCentral is fortifying its team collaboration capabilities at a time when they remain very relevant despite return-to-office mandates. The need will always be there to interact with colleagues in other locations as well as with customers, suppliers, partners, and other external parties.
Sales support capabilities
In what appears to be a nascent trend, vendors are incorporating sales support capabilities into either their contact centre or team collaboration portfolios. RingCentral is no exception.
A feature in RingCentral AI Receptionist (AIR) captures and updates sales leads in customer resource management (CRM) systems including Salesforce, HubSpot, or RingCentral AIR’s native database. Look for this trend to ripen quickly and for RingCentral and rivals to expand the volume of sales support features on their platforms.
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By GlobalDataSpeaking of trends, in the last few years, contact centres have profoundly transformed, steadily yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’. 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. RingCentral and its rivals continue to implement capabilities to help their customers make the transition.
AI capabilities
The contact centre capabilities RingCentral announced will go far toward that goal by making agents and supervisors much more effective in their roles. Some examples bear this out. The ‘Contextual Handover to Human Agents’ feature transfers calls along with summaries and caller context to agents, eliminating the need for customers to repeat themselves.
The new ‘CE Bundle’ is a lightweight contact centre combining RingCentral’s RingEX UCaaS platform with SMS and ‘Call Queue’ add-ons allowing organisations to see how voice and SMS driven interactions are progressing in real time. The ‘AI Interaction Analytics’ feature of the RingWEM (Workforce Engagement Management) suite provides insight into drivers of customer satisfaction (CSAT) across voice and digital channels.
Following trends
Consistently enhancing its platform has kept RingCentral among the ranks of top competitors in the unified communications and collaboration space. However, the company tends to be a follower rather than a leader.
This latest round of introductions proves to be no exception with them largely reflected by the likes of Cisco, Zoom, and 8×8.
For example, Cisco’s ‘AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center’ can perform the same function as the ‘Contextual Handover to Human Agents’ feature announced by RingCentral; Zoom has already announced that its ‘Revenue Accelerator’ sales intelligence tool will soon have the capability to generate prospects just like that unveiled in RingCentral AI Receptionist (AIR); meeting capabilities found in 8×8’s ‘8×8 Work’ include AI generated meeting summaries and action items similar to the upgrade for RingCentral’s AI virtual assistant.
However; if RingCentral can get out of the gate faster going forward, it will further strengthen its market position.
