RingCentral announced the launch of its Contact Center platform, which is powered by inContact, a provider of cloud contact center software.
The solution is integrated with RingCentral Office and gives contact center agents the ability to engage customers through multiple channels, including voice, email, chat and SMS.
Administrators have the ability to set up multi-channel, skills-based routing and advanced interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities with a visual call flow editor.
In addition, real-time reporting capabilities are designed to help administrators monitor key metrics and improve call center efficiencies or identify areas for business performance improvement. “We spoke with many other cloud players in the space and we came to the conclusion after digging deep that inContact was the best fit for us. We also knew how complete inContact’s solution is, given that we’ve been a customer of theirs for over four years,” Marco Casalaina, vice president of contact center solutions for RingCentral, told eWEEK. “We have 500 RingCentral customer care agents on the inContact solution.
“Some companies are still getting over the hurdle of whether to use an on-premises contact center or move to a cloud-based contact center solution. Sure, voice is still a driving force in contact centers, but nowadays consumers want to communicate with businesses in multiple ways,” Casalaina said.
“Today’s cloud technology supports multi-channel contact centers with voice, SMS, chat, and email. Technologically, it’s not a big challenge to deploy a cloud- based contact center solution. Instead, the challenge is legacy and culture,” he said.
Contact Center will be available in May in the U.S. and Canada. It comes in three editions with monthly subscriptions, including Basic, Advanced and Ultimate.
Basic edition provides core Contact Center functionality through voice channel. Advanced edition provides capabilities included in Basic along with multichannel support for email, chat and SMS.
Ultimate edition provides all capabilities plus automated outbound voice functionality.
Casalaina explained that the cloud opens up more customer engagement options and gives unprecedented access to real time data and analytics so business decision makers can understand exactly what is happening in their contact center.
He said in the near future, customers will demand that their unified communications and their contact center be integrated, and that both of those be pre-integrated to other systems that they’re using, such as their CRM and ERP systems.
“The next few years will find customers communicating via new channels–maybe Weibo, maybe Facebook, maybe something that hasn’t even been invented yet–and a cloud solution like RingCentral will always stay abreast of those changes to ensure that businesses can communicate by any means their customers choose,” he said.
Editor’s Note: An earlier headline incorrectly identified inContact as inConnect.