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Overview of RingCentral's RingCX AI-powered CCaaS platform
RingCentral's new contact center-as-a-service offering, RingCX, is poised to shake up the CCaaS market. Explore its benefits and features to see if it works for your organization.
Contact center as a service uses a subscription-based model that hosts contact center infrastructure and multichannel customer contact touchpoint services within a service provider's internet-accessible cloud. While CCaaS isn't exactly new, more entrants are entering the market, including RingCentral. This article explores RingCentral's RingCX CCaaS solution, the types of customers that might be interested in using it and its key features, as well as pricing and availability.
What is RingCX?
Offered as an all-in-one omnichannel CCaaS offering, RingCX delivers a cloud-based contact center service across voice and digital communications channels, including the following:
- Inbound and outbound call centers.
- Video calling.
- Email.
- Text messaging.
- Live chat and live messaging.
- Social media.
- Fax.
RingCX is powered by the RingCentral RingSense AI platform, which collects and analyzes customer touchpoint interaction data to provide insights into how a business can be more efficient and ensure the best customer service possible. Features include automated collection, speech recognition and dictation of calls; call center agent scoring and reporting; keyword tracking; and connectors and APIs for integration with third-party tools, such as sales and CRM systems.
Who is RingCX for?
The RingCX CCaaS solution targets SMBs that don't want to manage on-premises offerings and those that have standard contact center requirements.
Larger organizations that need to fine-tune their contact center platform to adhere to specific requirements might not be satisfied with RingCX's current capabilities. But businesses that want a modern contact center with a host of the most popular omnichannel tools and AI analysis should consider RingCX as it doesn't require upfront Capex.
Key features and benefits of RingCX
Despite being a newcomer to the CCaaS market, RingCX has the following popular contact center features:
- Multichannel customer touchpoints. The platform combines the inbound and outbound voice, video calling, IM and virtual assistant capabilities that many customer-facing teams want.
- Automation, analytics and reporting. Management teams can gain deep visibility across all customer touchpoints to analyze data and produce various reports on how well sales and customer service teams are functioning and responding to customers. Coaching and quality management reports are easily accessible, which provides enterprise-grade visibility with little manual intervention.
- Simplified, as-a-service deployment model. Because RingCX uses an as-a-service model, there is no hardware to install, purchase and manage. Instead, IT teams purchase licenses and manage the RingCX platform using a web-based interface. This enables significantly reduced implementation costs and time spent managing the system.
- A growing list of third-party integrations. RingCX already supports a number of popular third-party integrations, such as Calabrio, Facebook, Salesforce, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Zendesk. While some popular integrations like HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics and ServiceNow are missing at this point, RingCentral stated that they are coming soon.
RingCX pricing and availability
At this time, RingCX is focused on providing services for customers in the U.S., Canada and United Kingdom. Future expansion includes businesses in France and Germany.
According to the RingCentral website, a single license model is $65 per agent, per month based on annual prepay pricing. Multiyear licensing is likely depending on the number of agent licenses required and must be quoted through the RingCentral sales team.
RingCX agent licenses in the U.S. and Canada include voice, video, more than 20 digital channels and AI summaries. Unlimited domestic inbound and manual outbound calling is also included, but it doesn't apply to interactive voice response-only packages. Users in the U.K. are likely to incur additional monthly charges for inbound and outbound calling.
While RingCX offers a package of advanced features, like AI, and competitive pricing, it's not the only CCaaS offering on the market. Companies like Five9, Genesys and Nice Systems have well-established offerings that might be better suited to certain use case environments. However, it's nice to see more competition in this space.
Andrew Froehlich is founder of InfraMomentum, an enterprise IT research and analyst firm, and president of West Gate Networks, an IT consulting company. He has been involved in enterprise IT for more than 20 years.