At its ConnectCentral user conference this week, business cloud communications and collaborations solutions provider RingCentral introduced RingCentral Engage, a single customer engagement platform for managing customer interactions across all digital channels. The company also launched a unified mobile app and several voice analytics partnerships and integrations.
RingCentral Engage, which includes technologies gained during RingCentral's acquisition of Dimelo, leverages an artificial intelligence-based smart routing engine. With it, contact center agents can leverage team messaging and video, bringing relevant agents and experts from across the organization into digital and video conversations with customers. Agents can also elevate from real-time messaging communications, such as Apple Business Chat, SMS, in-app messaging, or web chat, to video conversations.
"In today's business environment, to remain competitive, companies of all sizes and across industries need to transform how they do business," said Dave Sipes, chief operating officer at RingCentral, in a statement. "Through the integration of RingCentral Engage with our team messaging and video solutions, customers will have access to a fully integrated and seamless communications experience that enables businesses to deliver on the promise of world-class digital customer engagement."
"As consumers' preferred modes of communications evolve, it's important to empower agents with the right tools that will give them the ability to engage customers across multiple channels. It's also important to enable agents to access the expertise they need from people throughout their organization," said Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst at Commfusion, in a statement. "The new RingCentral Engage product will give businesses a robust way to better manage customer interactions."
The new RingCentral unified mobile app also unites voice, team messaging, video meetings, and other key features into a single user experience. It allows users to create teams based on different topics, add internal and external team members, have persistent chat, and share files, notes, tasks, calendar events, GIFs, emojis, and more.
The enterprise voice capabilities include business number identity, the ability to dial out and receive calls, extension dialing, and the ability to send SMS globally and escalate from a chat to a call. Users can also schedule, start, and join video and screen-sharing meetings with a single click.
The new RingCentral unified mobile app can be downloaded now from the app store, and will be available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean by the end of this month.
RingCentral has also added AI-enabled voice analytics to its open platform, partnering with Gong.io, ThetaLake, and Velvetech to deliver voice analytics services to users.
The Velvetech integration enables real-time voice analytics and real-time transcription with machine learning capabilities from XSELL.
Gong.io, a conversation intelligence platform for sales teams, now leverages RingCentral's open APIs to develop a post-call analytics solution that incorporates machine learning for sales teams to drive best practices and effectiveness at scale.
ThetaLake, a provider of compliance solutions for audio and video communications, worked closely with RingCentral to enable businesses in highly regulated industries such as financial services and insurance to archive audio recordings.
RingCentral also enhanced its partner integrations with Box and Google. RingCentral Archiver with Box now allows users to archive key RingCentral communications data, such as SMS, fax, voicemail, and call recordings, automatically to their Box accounts. Once in Box, RingCentral data can be enhanced with artificial intelligence using Box Skills. With the native Google Calendar Add-on, users can now choose RingCentral for both audio and video calling.
"The democratization of AI is quickly becoming a reality," said David Lee, vice president of product management at RingCentral, in a statement. "By partnering with a growing ecosystem of AI companies and enabling them to leverage RingCentral open APIs to integrate with RingCentral cloud communications solutions, we are offering our customers access to broader AI services. This allows them to capture timely customer data and drive greater customer engagement and value."