Ring Central Contact Center was introduced in early 2015 to differentiate it from the rapidly expanding RingCentral Office product. This was because RingCentral Premium and Enterprise were bludgeoning with advanced call handing features that where specific only to Contact Centers. However, it became clear to RingCentral that not all SME (small medium enterprises) actually wanted to pay for or needed these advanced features, as they probably did need a Contact Center. As a result, RingCentral collated all the specialist call handling features that enable a business to support a contact center into one special edition – RingCentral Contact Center.
RingCentral Contact Center
What distinguishes RingCentral Contact Center from RingCentral Office is a commonly asked question of RingCentral support so let’s take a look at each in turn. To do this lets consider what RingCentral Office is as this is the standard edition for generic SMEs.
Ring Central Office
In short the RingCentral Office product is designed to provide your SME business with all the call functions for voice, messaging and video that you need to manage today’s communications. It allows you to efficiently manage your operations through what is termed unified communications. Furthermore as RingCentral Office is a cloud-based phone system, you can build up a hierarchy of PBX features to support multi-lines and configure multi-level IVRs with their own custom call queues, extensions and even departments. Also as mobility is now a major factor in SMEs RingCentral Office cuts the tethers from employees and the office desk and allows them to work anywhere with their own devices using RingCentral Desktop and mobile phone apps for Android and iOS. As a result RingCentral Office is a cloud based PBX solution that connects your office, remote and mobile employees under one phone system, with all the calling, messaging and collaboration tools they need.
Ring Central Contact Center
RingCentral Contact Center on the other hand is designed to be an omnichannel solution, which supports whatever communication channel your customers’ prefer to use. This is an important feature today as customers’ want to have a choice of the way that they contact your company. This is because although some still prefer voice, many others want to use email or instant messaging. This can be problematic for agents if they don’t have the necessary unified communication tools to hand. RingCentral Contact Center addresses this problem by giving agents access to the data derived from these diverse channels in one pane of glass view. RingCentral Contact Center also provides the productivity tools needed to solve problems quickly and efficiently. With its powerful yet easy to handle administrative panel and a user-friendly drag-and-drop development environment, RingCentral Contact Center provides the tools to deliver a better Contact Center experience.
RingCentral Contact Center Plans
As we have seen RingCentral have taken many of their advanced Contact Center features and created a new specialist product Ring Central Contact Center. Nonetheless Contact Centers come in many shapes and sizes as well as purposes. For example some Contact Centers are specifically setup to handle large amounts of incoming calls with few outbound calls. On the other hand others are setup to be outbound calling with much less incoming calls. Consequently RingCentral has configured their Contact Center to have three option plans;
- Basic – this service plan is designed for inbound voice only and has the following standard features;
- Standard IVR and ACD capabilities
- Integrated with RingCentral Office
- Collaborate using team message, video, and phone
- Advanced – this service plan integrates inbound calling functions with omnichannel support.
- Advanced omnichannel features for integrating voice, chat and email
- Business application integration for CRM or Financial packages
- Advanced real-time reporting and call handling analysis
- Ultimate – this version is designed for inbound, outbound and omnichannel support
- Advanced outbound dialing capabilities
- Predictive, progressive and preview outbound dialers
- Advanced campaign management
- Advanced reporting and analysis
- Agent scripting tools
There should be a feature plan to suit most SMEs from that selection as you can always device agents into incoming or outbound groups to save costs. Nonetheless all the agents will still have many of the standard Contact Center features.
Contact Center New Features
RingCentral have taken all their many advanced call features and collated them along with the standard IP/PBX functionality to produce an industry standard contact center product. The result is a fully integrated contact center management system. Furthermore, RingCentral have collaborated with IContact to produce a solution that merges all the various forms of customer interaction into one system. For example, Voice, Text, SMS, IM and presence are all converged into a single data source, which allows agents to observe all the customers history on one screen.
What is more, is that RingCentral Contact Center Edition also offers some amazing new features such as its ability to scale to any size, support any amount of agents and integrate with many business applications. This ability makes RingCentral Contact Center one of the leading vendors in the marketplace.
Subsequently, RingCentral has the ability to provide the facility to add and remove agents on demand, which gives the administrator control over operational efficiency and costs. Additionally, Contact Center Edition also provides automated skill based call routing (ACD) which is essential for modern contact center efficiency as it allows the supervisor to establish IVR menus that direct the caller to an agent skilled in resolving particular problems.
Another advanced feature of a cloud hosted system is that the customer gets to decide whether to use voice, chat, SMS, IM or Video chat when interacting with the contact center agent. This, invariably results in happier customers, and more efficient call resolution.
However, one of the major failings with previous contact center editions, whether by RingCentral or their competitors was the lack of reporting and supervisory controls. Thankfully, with RingCentral’s Contact Center Edition they have made strenuous efforts to address this problem.
RingCentral Contact Center has introduced an intuitive web-based tool, which provides contact center supervisors and agents with the facility to measure, monitor, and manage operations in order to achieve set KPI performance settings. As a result, the Caller information is displayed on agents’ screens with computer telephony integration (CTI) screen pop ups, which will reduce call handling times and enhancing the callers’ call experience. Furthermore, Contact Center Edition also supports caller ID to back office application integration so that it can recognize and pop up customer records based upon the incoming caller ID. This is hugely effective in providing a customer personalized service as the agent can address the caller using their name, the agent will also have on their screen the customers call history, which enables then to ask pertinent questions.
Reports & Analytics
With regards any contact center deployment there must be robust reporting and analytics and Contact Center Edition provided this via pre-built customized reports, ad-hoc reporting or through real-time dashboard suitable to be displayed on wall monitors for supervisors to monitor. This is important for any contact center as KPIs will often determine the length of time an agent spends on a call, the number of calls per day and the average time to answer an inbound call. In a dedicated contact center this is important however when deploying a virtual contact center utilizing home based agents then the supervisor must be able to determine the individual performance of each agent.
Reports & Analytics
With regards any contact center deployment there must be robust reporting and analytics and Contact Center Edition provided this via pre-built customized reports, ad-hoc reporting or through real-time dashboard suitable to be displayed on wall monitors for supervisors to monitor. This is important for any contact center as KPIs will often determine the length of time an agent spends on a call, the number of calls per day and the average time to answer an inbound call. In a dedicated contact center this is important however when deploying a virtual contact center utilizing home based agents then the supervisor must be able to determine the individual performance of each agent.
Outbound Dialing
Some of the cloud hosted services fail due to the lack of a dial tone and no outward bound dialing. RingCentral Contact Center provides outward bound dialing but where RingCentral makes a difference is that it can adjust to allow precious network capacity (bandwidth) to be provisioned for inbound calls should congestion arise, therefore you are unlikely to lose incoming calls.
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