Evolve IP Unified Communications vs. RingCentral MVP

I would leave it at the "?" rating because what can you rate them? 1 is too high. The only way they'd be "ok" is if: 1. Your company isn't growing and your users never leave the company. 2. You don't have to call support or make edits to the admin portal. 3. Don't need reporting. 4. Only use a physical phone to make/receive calls. 5. Do not plan to use a softphone or call center system. 6. Enjoy systems or people that frustrate you.

Incentivized

RingCentral excels for us in office environments where everyone has/needs an individual phone (either desk or via their computer). It is also uniquely suited for situations where workers may move between offices, work from home either during the day or after hours, or be on call in the evenings or weekends. The capabilities of the smartphone app means you are always on the office phone system, even showing a Caller ID as your office when calling a prospect, client, etc. This has been a surprising and much-liked feature for attorney's who don't want to expose their cell or home phone numbers in a call. Located in a hurricane-prone state, RingCentral is ideal for their resiliency to disaster that can keep local businesses connected and working after a hurricane. Having experienced that multiple times in the last 16 years with RingCentral, I can say that they have always worked flawlessly for us.

Incentivized

• One pane of glass to manage multiple sites
• Zero upfront cost of ownership
• Flexibility in configuration

• RingCentral service is solid and resilient to issues.
• RingCentral is easy to manage as an admin. Users, login styles, extensions, hardware, extensions, and more are always configurable and it makes it easy to support users.
• RingCentral offers many hardware options. It is easy to procure new hardware as well as outfit older hardware with the help of an adapter.

Incentivized

• I'd like to see them build out API functionality for reporting off of call data within the organization. They have a Call Center product that seems to include a fairly robust reporting module, but it would be nice to be able to do some more of this within the standard Phone System product as well.

Incentivized

• The team chat interface of the Glip application (also called Jupiter) isn't as refined as other chat interfaces. For example, it doesn't indicate when team members have read a message.
• The integration of Glip with on-premise Exchange is non-existent and not on the development radar.
• RingCentral personnel were not familiar with supporting paging devices, even though the platform does offer integration with some paging equipment manufacturers.

We are grandfathered into our unlimited toll-free minutes plan. We are very unlikely to switch because of that. It has been the major factor saving us a lot of money compared to switching to other solutions. I don't know any other company that still offers these unlimited plans.

Incentivized

Once you get used to the features of the system, it is extremely easy to find what you need. Everything is all on one place which makes the usability phenomenal. It is very user-friendly, and everything you need is mainly on the RC app. There is a separate window for your Max Agent, and everything is spelled out so you rarely have a question where something is.

I have never planned an outage with RingCentral. The only issue that I have experienced is bandwith issues where video is dropped.

Incentivized

Occasional bandwith issues. In addition to this, I have one individual whose calls are blocked. We were not able to determine whether this was a RingCentral or a carrier issue.

Incentivized

Support? If I could do everything myself with the time I don't have, I would do it better than their support. I don't like saying it that way, but it is the truth. We hired someone from another company that also used Evolve IP and when they found out that is what we used here, he expressed all of the same complaints and stories that we had.

Incentivized

Their customer support is top notch an provide us with all the answers we need quickly and concisely. We especially appreciated their Installation Services team who got us up and running on their platform within the short time frame we presented and had almost flawless performance in porting our services over to their platform

If someone has an existing system I tell them to keep that running initially and keep RingCentral separate initially until the system is configured and tested to one's satisfaction. After testing and configuration is completed, then roll over the main phone numbers to the new RingCentral system. I've seen one person who immediately flipped over to RingCentral without properly configuring/testing the software and had many issues with missed customer calls until I helped him sort out his configuration

Incentivized

We switched from 8x8 due to voice quality issues.

Incentivized

We used Vonage and a local softphone called Communicator prior to switching to RingCentral. Vonage dropped calls left and right and made it very difficult to use in general. Communicator linked to our CRMs, which was nice, but when installing call forwarding it automatically uploaded all CRM contacts into our personal phones and did not remove them even when the program was deleted. This was incredibly annoying, as in order to make a personal call to someone in our contacts, we had to sift through tens of thousands of contacts. RingCentral is simple, user friendly, and only does what it needs to.

Incentivized

not to sign up for it or give them any money for a product that does not work

There is a browser version which allows the product to be used by almost anyone.

Incentivized

• We have reduce operational expenses by an average of 30 percent by switching to EIP.
• Higher level of employee engagement with customers (given phone features).
• Only negativity would be if you have a single point of failure for internet service it proves to be a challenge.

• Low-cost teleconferencing and web-conferencing - Competitors for either can easily cost just as much as the full RingCentral platform
• Able to offer more customized services to partners/clients
• No need for any special hardware - just need a computer with internet
• Low investment to integrate with a CRM

Incentivized