New Advanced Cloud Phone and Platform Capabilities

RingCentral has announced several innovations across both its business cloud phone system and its unified business communications platform to help organizations of all sizes unlock cost-saving business benefits.

As IT teams and sales departments are under more pressure than ever to deliver operational efficiencies across their workstreams and workforce, these new capabilities help customers automate menial tasks, reduce app switching, and create custom workflows to solve unique business needs.

“Core to successfully enabling hybrid work is providing your people with the right communications and collaboration tools when and where they need them,” said Kira Makagon, Chief Innovation Officer at RingCentral.

“At RingCentral, we’re focused on delivering the best-connected experiences across the varying working styles, locations, and technologies to reduce operational inefficiencies and enable people to effortlessly connect with customers, teams, and everyone in between.”

RingCentral’s open platform supercharges Salesforce and Hubspot to help sales teams be top performers

The following features enable sales teams to increase their productivity with customizable business communications, including:

• Helping Salesforce customers do more: With RingCentral’s Salesforce integration enhancements, reps can easily conduct a warm transfer. A warm transfer enables reps to first speak to whoever is receiving the transfer call to provide valuable context and ensure the call will be more productive.
• Delight customers by texting them in HubSpot: Sales teams can now access both voicemail and fax capabilities within HubSpot.

New Advanced Phone Capabilities Simplify Experience for End-Users and IT Admins

The following new capabilities are designed to help IT teams realize significant time savings around bulk management and onboarding of distributed teams. New features include:

• Personal call forwarding made simple: Forward business calls to another extension, voicemail, or shared line with a single click when going on break or vacation. Think of it like an “out-of-office” assistant for your business phone.
• Auto-dialler to expedite services and dialling: Call pre-programmed numbers as soon as the phone is taken off the hook. For example, automatically dial the security office, emergency response team, concierge, or the front desk to expedite services.
• Line seizure for emergency services: Instantly lock down all the lines within particular sites so users can only make and receive calls to/from a phone number designated by emergency services.
• Enhancing self-service onboarding and support: The Resource Center tool built into the RingCentral app provides users with self-service resources to help them access rich instructional videos, documentation, feature overviews, and help and support.
• Capture actionable insights from call behaviour from the tools of your choice: RingCentral’s industry-leading line of business analytics are now available through APIs, as a public beta. With deeper insights, teams are better able to gauge performance across call queues, user groups, and individuals to drive greater efficiency, proactively identify staffing needs, and more.

Eliminate Toggling Between Apps With New RingCentral Add-Ins

RingCentral now offers users access to more apps within the RingCentral app, allowing them to save time with easier app-switching. Users now have access to the following:

• Google Drive Add-in: Be notified of new shared Google drive files, easily view files, and instantly provide file access to all team members in your RingCentral messaging group.
• Google Forms Add-in: Instantly view form responses as they come in.
• HubSpot Add-in: Instantly access contact details; find and share details of a company; and share the contact, deal, and ticket information easily with colleagues via team messaging.
• Zendesk Add-in: Agents can create tickets, respond to tickets, and be notified in real-time of new tickets within the RingCentral app.
• Trello Add-in: Receive notifications for Trello board activity and easily update Trello with completed tasks, new comments, and much more.
• Poll Add-In: Quickly create a simple poll, allow team members to submit responses within team chat, and instantly see the results in real time.
• Auto-reply assistant: Tired of always replying to the same questions in team messages? Auto-reply bot sends pre-determined replies based on keywords or when out of office.

“As we researched cloud solutions to replace our PBX infrastructure, we saw that with RingCentral, we could integrate a whole suite of communication features in one platform, connect our dozens of offices across the country for the first time ever, empower our employees to communicate from anywhere-and still save a million bucks a year,” said Philippe Bourdon, vice president of infrastructure at C&S Wholesale Grocers, an industry leader in supply chain solutions and wholesale grocery supply in the United States.

“It’s no secret that cloud phone systems enable organizations to scale, enhance their mobility, and offer a cost-effective communications platform,” said Jon Arnold, principal, J Arnold and Associates, an independent technology research and analyst firm.

“As a leader in the telephony space, the new innovations that RingCentral is announcing today provide users with a complete, secure, and connected phone system.

“This allows their customers to make a seamless transition to the cloud and offers IT administrators the capabilities they need to make set-up and management extremely easy and intuitive.”