RingCentral has revealed RingCentral for Teams 2.0.
Described in RingCentral’s announcement as a “next-gen” UC app for calling, faxing and SMS, the solution integrates RingCentral’s cloud PBX capabilities into Teams via a fully native experience without requiring another app. Among the innovative new features to boost productivity are voicemail transcription, call recording, bi-directional presence sync, and unified contact search. The offering can also be coupled with RingCentral’s CCaaS solution, RingCentral Contact Centre.
Mo Katibeh, President and COO of RingCentral, said:
Many businesses have standardized on Teams for internal collaboration, but when it comes to advanced communications, customers often seek out third-party solutions. When customer communications are critical, businesses look to RingCentral, given our reputation for 99.999% reliability and our robust and advanced telephony capabilities.”
Because most Teams customers have Microsoft 365 licenses which don’t include telephony capabilities — according to Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy — RingCentral for Teams is a popular UCaaS solution for enterprise. It provides “flexible, and highly reliable, deployment options and the ability to integrate enterprise-grade telephony and SMS, fax, analytics, CRM integrations, and other capabilities,” Lazar added.
New Generation Means New Features
RingCentral for Teams 2.0 introduces faster load times and a streamlined user interface. This produces an improved user experience with more refined capabilities and flexibility.
There are also significant specific innovations too, such as bi-directional presence sync. This means that presence status is automatically detected and synced between Microsoft Teams and RingCentral, including hardphones, to help users avoid interruptions.
Other new features include a new unified contact searching from RingCentral and Microsoft directories in RingCentral for Teams 2.0, so callers can find the right contact without app switching.
Full integration is critical to RingCentral for Teams 2.0, with deep integration with the Teams mobile app allowing users to make and receive calls through the service. There is also a new and extensive set of telephony app integrations for customers to connect CRMs and business apps, allowing them to automate critical workflows.
Customers can also leverage their integrated business telephony with an AI-powered contact centre within Teams.
“We’re excited to deliver this next generation of RingCentral for Microsoft Teams and empower customers with faster performance, deeper integration, a new mobile experience, and simpler admin tools,” Katibeh said.
RingCentral for Teams 2.0 will be available in open beta at the end of May and generally available this summer.
A Busy Time for RingCentral
It’s been a busy period for RingCentral, with new solutions and partnerships launched in recent months.
RingCentral and Vodafone upgraded their shared collaboration and calling platform, Vodafone Business Unified Communications (VBUC), to enhance the experience of mobile users.
RingCentral also launched a generative AI platform RingSense to enable businesses to turn conversation data into powerful insights. The first offering in the portfolio is RingSense for Sales, which assesses interactions between salespeople and potential customers to produce insights and performance metrics.
Earlier this year, RingCentral created an AI guidance offering in the form of producing a real-time guidance AI-powered agent solution for contact centre agents and managers in its App Gallery.
Steve Rafferty, VP of International at RingCentral, also told UC Today earlier this year that organizations need to transform hybrid working into a joy, not a chore, by leveraging tailored collaboration tools to the practice. The interview followed up RingCentral research, which found UK workers prefer hybrid working, with more than half of UK workers (51 percent) feeling more productive when they work from home.
