RingCentral Contact Center Review: Features & Pricing 2022
This article is part of a larger series on VoIP.
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RingCentral Contact Center Overview
PROS | CONS |
---|---|
Skills-based routing is a standard feature on all plans | Fees aren’t published on its website |
A wide range of application programming interfaces (API) is available | Integrations with popular business solutions like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Zendesk are offered as add-ons |
Offers over 30 digital channels for customer service | Automated dialers require add-on purchases |
Business phone capabilities included in all plans |
What We Recommend RingCentral Contact Center For
RingCentral is among the most popular business phone systems, packed with powerful unified communications features. Aside from its voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) platform, it offers a cloud-based contact center solution for businesses wanting to connect with customers across all channels. It is also worth considering for sales teams with campaign management needs.
When to Use RingCentral Contact Center
- Businesses looking for a contact center platform with robust agent productivity tools: RingCentral Contact Center has an agent scripting tool that establishes communication standards during interactions with leads and customers. It also offers dynamic reply assistance that provides agents with automatic suggestions based on channel, language, and message category. With these, RingCentral Contact Center is one of the top call center phone systems.
- Managers wanting to keep track of agent performance efficiently: RingCentral Contact Center earns a spot in our list of the best call monitoring software, offering a wide array of supervisor tools for monitoring agent performance. It offers screen recording, speech and text analysis, and silent monitoring. Coaching and learning tools are also available to track evaluation scores and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Inbound call centers that want to enhance call routing capabilities: It offers advanced IVR (interactive voice response) tools to manage phone tree menus and facilitate self-service actions more efficiently. Its visual IVR editor allows you to craft up to 250 IVR phone menus, creating a multilevel experience for callers. This puts RingCentral Contact Center on our list of the best IVR systems.
- Call centers handling high local call volumes: Subscribing to any of its contact center plans provides business phone capabilities like unlimited local calling in the U.S. and Canada. It is also among our list of the best Talkdesk alternatives for its ability to handle high volumes of domestic calls. Check out our RingCentral review to learn more about its unified communication features.
When RingCentral Contact Center Might Not Be a Good Fit
- Companies with an international presence: While RingCentral Contact Center offers virtual numbers in up to 100 countries, it doesn’t offer unlimited calling in international locations. Consider 8×8, which offers free voice calling to 48 countries and multilingual tools like an automatic translation chat feature.
- Remote teams that want to provide high-quality customer service on the go: RingCentral Contact Center comes with a mobile app, but its features are only limited to video meetings, team messaging, and integrations. If you’re looking for a full-featured contact center mobile app, try Talkdesk. The Talkdesk Conversations Mobile App is a native mobile contact center accessible on smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches.
- Small businesses looking for a low-cost contact center solution: RingCentral Contact Center doesn’t publish its pricing, which could potentially be a concern for small businesses. If you’re looking for a budget-friendly contact center platform, look no further than Freshdesk Contact Center. This solution offers a free version, and paid plans start at only $15 per user, per month, billed annually. Discover more about its services in our Freshdesk Contact Center Review.
- Businesses looking for customer relationship management (CRM) integrations: RingCentral Contact Center requires additional fees for integrations with Salesforce and Zendesk. If you want to avoid the cost of add-on purchases, consider CloudTalk. CloudTalk is a call center platform that connects to several CRMs, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM.
RingCentral Contact Center Pricing
RingCentral Contact Center offers four customized pricing plans for its call center solution. All plans include skills-based routing, advanced IVR, click-to-call function, open APIs, and real-time and historical reports. Contact its sales team for the full quote. Meanwhile, similar providers have paid plans that cost anywhere from $15 to $170 per user, per month.
Available add-ons depend on the plan you’re subscribed to. For example, subscribing to the Essentials plan (RingCentral Contact Center Voice) unlocks the following add-on features: screen recording, workforce management, and outbound dialers. Also, subscribing to any of the plans comes with integrated RingCentral MVP capabilities, including free domestic calling.
RingCentral Plans | Essentials | Standard | Premium | Ultimate |
---|---|---|---|---|
Best For | Businesses looking for a voice contact center | Teams that need a digital engagement solution | Those who need a contact center with quality management features | Companies looking for an omnichannel contact center with workforce management tools |
Unlimited Domestic Calling | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Skills-based Routing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Interactive Voice Response | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Advanced Voice Recording | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Digital Channels | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Quality Management | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
Screen Recording | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ |
Workforce Management | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
Performance Management | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✓ |
RingCentral Contact Center Features
RingCentral Contact Center offers an omnichannel call center solution that makes it easy for businesses to bring personalized customer experiences. It combines powerful administrative tools in a drag-and-drop development environment, giving you more control over managing contact center interactions. The platform also provides real-time reporting and analytics dashboards for monitoring critical metrics, such as first contact resolution and queue time.
General Features
RingCentral Contact Center comes with omnichannel capabilities that let you provide quality customer service across digital channels such as email, live chat, social media, and messaging apps. Its customer engagement platform makes it easy to connect with customers in their channel of choice and provides faster resolutions regardless of the digital channel you’re on.
RingCentral Contact Center lets you engage with customers on their preferred channels.
(Source: RingCentral Contact Center)
Additionally, RingCentral Contact Center offers multiple dialers that let you automate outbound calling efforts while reducing time spent on dialing. Dialing modes include progressive, preview, and predictive. Besides its 300 APIs, the platform seamlessly integrates with its business phone system, RingCentral MVP, which is one of the best voip services for businesses of all sizes and offers unified communication capabilities in a single platform.
Intelligent Call Routing
RingCentral Contact Center offers various intelligent call routing options to help resolve issues faster and direct customers to the right destination the first time. Skills-based routing is offered at the entry-level tier, matching customers to the right resource based on agent skill set. It also offers omnichannel routing that directs customer queries across service channels.
RingCentral Contact Center allows you to set up routing rules based on agent skill set.
(Source: RingCentral Contact Center)
RingCentral Contact Center uses machine learning to understand message intent, message type (public or private), and text semantics. This streamlines customer support and increases agent productivity by matching customer interactions with agents who have the right knowledge, skills, and experience. Intelligent routing also helps in data-driven routing by enabling agents to access crucial data from CRM systems.
Automation
RingCentral Contact Center utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) in building its contact center automation tools. Virtual assistants are designed to handle simple and common queries, while chatbots automatically gather information and transfer interactions to agents with full context. The intelligent IVR and self-service options are also powered by automation, allowing callers to perform routine actions over the phone without the interference of a human agent.
RingCentral Contact Center lets you create chatbots to provide quick answers to basic customer queries.
(Source: RingCentral Contact Center)
Virtual hold is an automated feature that helps reduce customer wait time. Instead of letting callers wait in a queue, it offers the option to call them back without losing their position in the queue. It also offers call deflection by programming the IVR to offer alternative ways of communication instead of keeping customers waiting.
Workforce Management
RingCentral Contact Center offers workforce management tools that let you optimize agent schedules and shifts to maximize coverage and reduce idle time. Automated tools allow teams to execute important human resources tasks, such as viewing schedules, managing absences, and requesting changes. It also enables users to anticipate trends and customer needs through performance management analytics.
RingCentral Contact Center offers workforce management tools to manage agent schedules.
(Source: RingCentral Contact Center)
To boost agent engagement, gamification tools are designed to give agents challenges, prizes, and badges while gaining feedback on how agents are performing. Meanwhile, quality management tools help in coaching and providing feedback through screen and call recordings.
Agent Tools
RingCentral Contact Center provides a wide range of agent tools to enhance work productivity and deliver better customer experiences. For example, the agent scripting feature builds scripts for agents to help them with onboarding and training whenever there’s a new product or offer. The agent scripting tool consists of different buttons, fields, and images that agents can interact with during customer interactions.
RingCentral Contact Center’s agent scripting tool contains various elements to ensure smooth interactions with leads and customers.
(Source: RingCentral Contact Center)
Identity merge is another agent tool that lets you detect customers’ profiles across channels using their contact records. This gives you a full view of their past interactions with other agents. There’s also dynamic reply assistance, which provides agents with automatic suggestions based on customers’ details, message category, language, and channel. Other agent tools include availability status, co-browse, and transfer and approval.
Supervisor Tools
RingCentral Contact Center provides various supervisor tools to better monitor individual agent performance for coaching and feedback. Basic features include screen and call recording, which offers insight into how an agent is performing and provides feedback on how to navigate call center systems.
RingCentral Contact Center offers dashboard and coaching tools to help supervisors manage call center performance. (Source: RingCentral Contact Center)
Dual listening is a call monitoring feature that allows you to view the entire conversation, leave comments, or respond on the agent’s behalf. Activate the silent monitoring tool to keep track of agent activity and use the whisper or barge-in feature in case they need assistance. RingCentral also features speech and text analytics, which enables you to review customer conversations and spot trends quickly.
RingCentral Contact Center Alternatives
RingCentral software is a digital engagement platform that helps businesses provide exceptional customer experiences across digital channels. However, core functionalities, such as automated dialers and CRM integrations, are not part of its preconfigured packages. If you’re looking for more options, these alternatives are a great fit for your specific contact center needs:
Best for: Companies looking for extensive AI-powered features like agent assistance and knowledge management | Best for: Small businesses looking for a budget-friendly ticket management software | Best for: Businesses in need of international numbers in several countries |
Starting price: $75 per user, per month* | Starting price: Free for the basic plan; $18 per user, per month, for the first paid tier | Starting price: $25 per user, per month, billed annually |
or | or | or |
*Pricing is based on a three-year contract
RingCentral Contact Center Reviews: What Users Think
RingCentral Contact Center reviews reveal that its platform is fairly easy to use and set up. They appreciate its robust feature sets, particularly its call flow management, enabling them to streamline company processes. Many users also praised its business phone integration because it allows them to make and receive texts and calls across devices. It also works well for businesses that need an extensive reporting system to monitor the efficiency of call queues.
At the time of publication, RingCentral Contact Center has earned the following scores on popular user review sites:
- Capterra: 4.3 out of 5 based on 164 reviews
- G2: 3.9 out of 5 based on 102 reviews
- Software Advice: 4.28 out of 5 based on 164 reviews
- TrustRadius: 8.0 out of 10 based on 41 reviews
There are a few negative reviews related to call drops, temporary glitches, and connection difficulties. Metrics are also hard to understand and the CRM integration is tricky to set up. There are mixed reviews about customer support, but many users commend its efficiency and expertise.
Bottom Line
RingCentral Contact Center’s digital engagement platform comes with intuitive tools, helping resolve issues faster and delivering a more personalized service to every customer. Overall, we recommend this as an excellent omnichannel solution for companies wanting to deliver the right support on the most convenient channel.