RingCentral Q&A – The Future of Customer Communication

Sunny Dhami of RingCentral answers questions on the future of unified communications and also discusses RingCentral’s new relationship with PTS Consulting.

1. What challenges are enterprises facing today when it comes to communications technology?

Communications technology is key to all companies—from small to medium-sized businesses, through to large, multinational organizations. And today, we have a plethora of communications channels—from traditional voice calls and emails, through to web conferencing, instant messaging, video, social media and text.

But while many believe more communications channels help businesses, our research shows that the influx of channels has created an app overload which is actually costing enterprises billions in lost productivity.

In fact, 69% of workers waste up to an hour a day navigating between apps, which equates to wasting a staggering 32 days per year. What’s more, over 70% of workers say their communications volume is a challenge to getting work done.

2. How can unified communications address these challenges?

There’s no doubt that the shift to digital brings many advantages to businesses, but communications channels need to be managed effectively.

Ultimately, businesses need a single platform that is able to integrate the various communications modalities used by their employees on a daily basis to bring simplicity to their working day.

In fact, employees believe a single communications platform would help them be more productive at work (65%), make work feel less chaotic (62%), and make it easier to work remotely (61%).

3. Many businesses have disparate workforces, whether that’s employees working remotely or across global offices. Why is unified communications important for these workforces?

Workforces are becoming increasingly distributed to either support flexible working practices or as a way to address the ongoing skills gap that many industries, like the IT industry, face.

Distributed workforces will continue to rise for a number of reasons. Firstly, as the economic uncertainty continues, it will only get harder to find skilled workers in one location. Secondly, remote working will increasingly become the norm as employers look to create workplace cultures that give employees the flexibility they crave—the ability to work when, where, and however they like.

Unified communications technologies are able to support remote working globally, allowing employees to communicate across different channels, and locations—both with co-workers, and customers.

While we all know the benefits of customers being able to communicate with brands across different channels, unified communications technologies are crucial for employees working remotely or in different geographic locations, as they help employees feel like they are part of a team.

According to our own research, 83% of employees love or like using team messaging, while 88% love or like using video to communicate with their colleagues—these tools help bridge the remote working gap, and are crucial for employee engagement.

4. You recently announced a partnership with PTS Consulting, a project management business. How has the implementation of unified communications helped solve its business challenges?

PTS Consulting was challenged with enabling an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce while lowering operating costs. The company relies on mobile communications to manage its client engagements, and as such, was looking for a solution that could best enable its employees to communicate and collaborate from anywhere, as well as provide better engagement with customers across its 12 global locations.

By combining voice calls, video, web meetings, and team messaging in one, easy-to-use cloud solution, RingCentral has transformed PTS Consulting’s enterprise communications. What’s more, because the RingCentral solution is available via a mobile app, it supports PTS Consulting’s mobile way of working.

As the RingCentral solution is cloud-based, PTS Consulting was able to replace its legacy systems with a cost-effective solution that is able to streamline with the company’s workflows.

5. PTS Consulting was looking for a solution to help improve its internal and external communications. How has RingCentral helped?

There are some key features of the RingCentral solution that enable PTS Consulting to improve both its internal and external communications.

For example, the team-messaging-based user interface allows PTS Consulting’s employees to create teams based on different topics. Employees can add internal and external team members, and can chat, share files, notes, tasks, as well as calendar events. The video meetings capability is also important, as it enables employees from any of its global offices to schedule and join video and screen sharing meetings, thus improving collaboration.

In terms of improving external communications, the RingCentral solution allows PTS Consulting’s employees to easily communicate with their customers no matter their location or the device they’re using. Furthermore, with a simple click of a button, employees can quickly escalate their conversations from a webchat to a call, depending on the urgency of the customer query.

6. How do you see the market for unified communications developing this year?

The unified communications and collaboration market is booming—in fact, it is set to exceed $60 billion by 2025 (according to Global Markets Insights).

There are a number of reasons for this continued growth. Firstly, the way people communicate in their personal lives has changed dramatically, and it’s crept into the workplace.

Employees, in particular younger generations, expect parity between personal and work communications—they expect multiple modalities like voice, text messaging and video.

To support this multi-modal demand, businesses are looking for cloud solutions that can enable a seamless communications experience across channels, scale globally, and not break the bank.

Secondly, with the workforce becoming more distributed and mobile, businesses are realizing that cloud solutions are the only way to truly enable today’s modern workers; the on-premise legacy systems of the past are ineffective and obsolete.

It’s no longer a question of if businesses should move to the cloud for their communications, but when, and that’s why this market is continuing to grow.

When I talk to enterprises about digital transformation, oftentimes the first item on the agenda is communications.

It’s the foundation on which a business operates, and just like in property, if the foundation is weak, one unfortunate event or natural disaster can take it down.