The Evolution of RingCentral: Latest Products, Updates, and Transformations in 2023

In recent years, the rising demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions in the communication landscape has opened the door to rapid evolution and digital transformation. Not only are new vendors emerging in the scene to tackle emerging issues, like maintaining team synchronization in a hybrid world, but established vendors are evolving too.

RingCentral stands as perhaps one of the best examples of a vendor that has effectively responded to the changing needs of the landscape faster than most. Considered an innovator in its field, RingCentral has been awarded countless accolades over the years.

It’s also one of the few UCaaS companies that has maintained a long-standing presence in the Gartner UC Magic Quadrant. In 2022, the company celebrated its 8th year as a leader in the quadrant.

So, how exactly has RingCentral’s passion for innovation helped it to make waves in the digital landscape in recent years? Here’s an insight into some of the ways RingCentral is breaking the mould in the communications industry.

Changing the UCaaS Landscape: The Evolution of RingCentral UC

RingCentral has long been recognized as one of the top vendors in the Unified Communications landscape. In recent years, its UCaaS platform has evolved to focus specifically on three of the key areas of communication transforming the modern landscape: messaging, voice, and telephony.

The RingCentral “MVP” platform has been reimagined throughout the years, to create a simpler, more powerful environment in which teams can collaborate and connect. The platform doesn’t just offer global phone services and video meeting tools, it also provides access to intuitive messaging channels, and a comprehensive analytics ecosystem for tracking essential metrics.

RingCentral’s MVP platform has even evolved to focus more heavily on the world of hybrid work in recent years, with the introduction of “RingCentral Webinars” for online interactions, and all-in-one RingCentral Rooms toolkits for hybrid meetings.

Interestingly, RingCentral also introduced a new “joint cloud” solution for service providers in recent years, considered a “new phase” in the evolution of UCaaS by analysists. RingCentral Rise, the end-to-end managed service solution gives partners a way to leverage a host of RingCentral resources, innovation, system integration and experience tools, to create their own UCaaS tools.

Built on RingCentral’s own proprietary cloud technology, Rise integrates with partner technology, and provides access to co-branded applications that are consistently updated. The company even offers a full go-to-market programme for partners, with service provider portals, and dedicated support.

Creating Intelligent Contact Centres

RingCentral isn’t just a market leader in the UCaaS world. The company is also making waves in the customer experience space too. Unlike other CCaaS vendors, RingCentral has taken a unique approach with its contact centre technology strategy, promising companies a way to transform both customer and employee experience at the same time.

The omnichannel contact centre solution provides companies with all the tools they need to speed up support across a range of platforms, with AI-enabled and intuitive tools. Not only do companies have a chance to interact with their audience wherever they are, but they can boost agent satisfaction with an integrated communication, collaboration, and workforce engagement platform too.

RingCentral’s CCaaS technologies address a broad range of use cases in the digital world. Companies can create proactive customer outreach campaigns with automated workflows, and design comprehensive self-service platforms, which allow customers to access support from intelligent bots and virtual assistants.
What’s more, RingCentral offers dedicated contact centre solutions for different industries. Companies can access full toolkits for healthcare management, retail, and financial services. RingCentral’s CCaaS solutions are secure and reliable, with 99.99% uptimes, and compliant with many of the most significant regulations in the world.

However, perhaps most importantly, the CCaaS platform integrates seamlessly with RingCentral MVP, allowing companies to effectively bridge the gap between their cloud environments, improving productivity and team-wide collaboration.

Bridging the Gaps: APIs, Integrations and Partnerships

Perhaps one of the biggest factors that has helped RingCentral to differentiate itself from its competitors in recent years, is it’s ongoing commitment to flexibility. While, in the past, many software companies struggled to provide integrations and connections with other tools, RingCentral has long focused on developing a truly “open” platform.

RingCentral’s “platform” technology allows companies to adapt their software and solutions to their specific needs, without restrictions. The open ecosystem comes with access to:

• A comprehensive app gallery: RingCentral’s ever-expanding gallery of integrations and apps allows companies to connect the tools they already use to the RingCentral ecosystem. The solutions ensure teams can create comprehensive workflows in an all-in-one environment, leveraging automation, productivity, CRM, and analytics tools.
• APIs and SDKs: RingCentral also makes its platform accessible and friendly for developers too. Companies can build custom workflows and applications with open APIs, SDKs and widgets, all designed to be as accessible as possible. There are even multiple coding languages to choose from when building new apps and components.
• ISV Partners: RingCentral is no stranger to partnering with other innovative brands. The company works hand-in-hand with a variety of independent software vendors to bring cutting edge technology and solutions to customers. Companies can even leverage the power of RingCentral alongside tools like Microsoft Teams.

RingCentral’s growing and flexible ecosystem helps to remove the silos and gaps between critical tools and resources companies rely on every day. What’s more, the company’s dedicated approach to customer service ensures teams can get step-by-step support with building and implementing any software environment.

RingCentral Focus Areas: What’s Next?

While it’s difficult to know for certain exactly where any SaaS business is going to go in the years ahead, we can provide some insights into the apparent journey map of the RingCentral brand. For instance, in the last year, RingCentral has made a host of new updates to its MVP platform, to improve uptime performance, as well as developing new integrations for Microsoft Teams.

The company has also consistently improved its administration tools and services, making it easier for companies to manage software, license, and security controls in one convenient place.

When it comes to assessing the potential product roadmap for RingCentral, it seems likely that the company will not only continue to develop its existing solutions, but dive deeper into some more transformative and disruptive areas too.

Recently, the company showcased its commitment to leveraging the power of AI, with the “RingSense for Sales” platform. This solution, specially designed for sales teams, promises access to a new level of conversational intelligence. The solution promises to automate mundane tasks for sales reps, reveal hidden value from conversations, and provide state-of-the-art coaching tools.

Other key areas of focus for RingCentral include:
• Advanced bot tools: As self-service becomes increasingly essential to the customer experience landscape, particularly with the introduction of generative AI, RingCentral is helping teams to get the most out of their bots. The company introduced a new “bot skill store” in 2023, designed to help companies build bots without having to start from scratch.
• Improving experiences: RingCentral differentiates itself from other vendors in the digital landscape, by focusing on “total experience”, rather than just customer experience. The tools in the software kits offered by RingCentral are designed to minimize frustrations for agents, improve productivity levels, and boost engagement for teams in hybrid and remote worlds. There are even proactive real-time alerts available for supervisors, to help with guiding coaching sessions and feedback for staff.
• Enhancing collaboration: During 2022, RingCentral built over 800 new features and enhancements for its MVP platform to improve team work and collaboration. Going forward, the company seems to be focused on continuing this process, introducing new and advanced integrations with Microsoft Teams, improved tools for collaboration on meeting notes, and rich visualization tools with RingCentral whiteboard.

Notably, RingCentral is also one of the many SaaS vendors in the world today to be focusing heavily on the areas of trust and security. The company has its own dedicated “RingCentral Trust Centre” where customers can access information about the company’s security technologies, privacy standards, and compliance certifications.

What’s more, RingCentral provides full transparent visibility into its reliability, with insights into uptime scores that anyone can access on the RingCentral website. Going forward, RingCentral will likely continue to expand on its security standing, building on new features like enhanced end-to-end phone and messaging encryption, and security for the hybrid workforce.

Looking to the Future with RingCentral

For years, RingCentral has successfully built a presence in the digital market as one of the most reliable, and innovative companies for communication software. Covering everything from the UCaaS and collaboration landscape, to customer and employee experience, the RingCentral portfolio is constantly evolving to offer new value.

As the brand continues to work with partners and researchers to consistently enhance its solutions and deliver more opportunities to businesses, it seems certain RingCentral will remain a top contender in its landscape. If your company is looking for a way to digitally transform it’s unified communication, collaboration, or contact centre strategy, RingCentral could be the perfect tool.

Check out our helpful UCAdvisor Comparison Matrix for help determining whether RingCentral is the right platform for you. Alternatively, reach out to our team to find out how you can use our Transformation fund to finance your digital transformation strategy.