RingCentral Debuts Next-Generation Meetings, Contact Center Services

**Editor’s Note: Read our list of 20 top UCaaS providers offering products and services via channel partners.**

RingCentral Wednesday launched new integrated collaborative meeting and contact-center services.

RingCentral Meetings includes integrated team messaging, online meetings, video conferencing, screen-sharing and task management, allowing for a full meeting experience. It is available standalone and can be upgraded to the full cloud communications capabilities of RingCentral Office.

RingCentral’s Kira Makagon

Key features include: HD video conferencing; screen sharing; RingCentral Glip team messaging; file sharing and task management; and moving from team messaging to web meetings.

“RingCentral continues to revolutionize collaborative communications with the introduction of our next-generation RingCentral Meetings solution,” said Kira Makagon, the company’s executive vice president of innovation. “RingCentral Meetings works the way people do. They can connect and collaborate, exchange ideas and creativity before, during and after the meetings, no matter where they are or what time it is.”

According to Frost & Sullivan, the total video conferencing market is expected to reach $11.7 billion by 2021, with rapid adoption coming from next-generation devices and cloud services.

“User demand for web meetings and team collaboration solutions is booming, and it’s a smart move by RingCentral to combine the two capabilities for increased user productivity,” said Roopam Jain, Frost & Sullivan’s industry director of collaboration technologies.

The collaborative contact center includes RingCentral Contact Center integrated with Glip team messaging and collaboration, and the new RingCentral Pulse, a service that allows agents and supervisors to communicate and collaborate across their organizations in real time to resolve customer issues efficiently.

RingCentral Pulse provides intelligent bots that monitor critical call-center metrics in real time, and provides automated alerts and notifications directly to RingCentral Glip messaging teams. In addition, all the various agent groups in the contact center have corresponding teams in RingCentral Glip to enlist help of other agents and experts in the enterprise to improve response times.

“We’re pioneering a new approach to customer engagement and giving companies a better way to serve their customers that goes beyond the traditional contact center,” said Jim Dvorkin, RingCentral’s senior vice president of contact center. “RingCentral is delivering on its collaborative communications vision, which puts collaboration at the center of the customer experience, and extending it to the contact center.”

RingCentral’s fourth-quarter 2017 revenue and profit topped analysts’ expectations. Software-subscriptions revenue grew 32 percent year over year to nearly $130 million. Annual recurring revenue for RingCentral Office, its UCaaS offering, grew 36 percent year over year to more than $466 million.

Zane Long, RingCentral’s vice president of global channel sales, recently spoke with Channel Partners about his company’s growth, and his plans for recruiting partners that have been working with Cisco, Avaya, Mitel and other competitors.