Item: RingCentral
Rating: 5
Author: Tristan Dobbs

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

RingCentral is our current VoIP provider and telecommunications system. It is used by employees to make and take calls, by our support team to route calls and act as a group, by our operations team to route and forward calls as well as collect using a group number, and by sales to make outbound calls.

Pros and Cons

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.

RingCentral keeps pushing people to a user interface that couldn't be less helpful. It is a "collaboration" platform that is fundamentally useless and to get to the actual softphone is sometimes hard to do given that the default is this other option.
RingCentral is not easy to get support as an end-user. Support often blames issues on "jitter" though this is not usually the case.

Return on Investment

RingCentral has improved outbound calling by sales over our previous solution by offering track-able metrics.
We have decreased the number of missed tickets, improving our response times and rates greatly.

Alternatives Considered

Dialpad and Google Voice

The biggest difference between RingCentral and its competitors is that the service is solid without sacrificing features. The infrastructure is great, which means that quality is high. But the interface is lacking and older-looking. It would do well to take a page from the Google Voice book, but it does offer a great many features, which are more important in the end.

Support Rating

Support does not offer solutions that can be used to take action. For instance, if call quality is low, it could be due to many reasons. Bad hardware, bad WiFi, RingCentral service issues, the recipient of a call, the caller of a call, etc. But RingCentral support does seem to want to pin most of the issues on "jitter" and wait for the issue to go away.

Key Insights

Do you think RingCentral delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with RingCentral's feature set?

Yes

Did RingCentral live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of RingCentral go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy RingCentral again?

Other Software Used

Google Voice, Mavenlink, Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point

Likelihood to Recommend

RingCentral is solid as a platform and does offer a full host of features to end-users and admins alike. It would fit well in many medium to large organisations who need IVR, call routing, answering services, hunt groups, and more. It is not very well suited for small companies or those with large call centres.

A solid competitor in a very crowded space.

Overall Satisfaction with RingCentral