“At RingCentral we want to democratise access to technology, to ensure any business can have the same communications and collaboration capabilities as large organisations,” said RingCentral regional vice president of sales Peter Hughes. “With the launch of RingCentral Customer Service Essentials, we provide a simple yet powerful solution that simplifies employee and customer communications; strengthens customer service and staff efficiency, and scales operations at an affordable price.”

The new RingCentral solution gives businesses access to a fully featured business communications solution that includes team messaging, video meetings, and a cloud phone system. It provides real-time insights as well as historical data on customer interactions which in turn enables them to better serve their customers and increase productivity among their employees.

According to market research firm IDC's 2022 Worldwide SMB Market Profile Update, which examines the state of global small to medium-sized businesses with 1-999 employees, improving productivity and enhancing customer experience are two of the top five immediate business priorities for the next 12 months.

One important consideration is how technology can be used to handle peaks and troughs in customer demand. For National Rugby League (NRL) club Parramatta Eels, the busiest times of the year for the Eels’ membership team is in the lead in to Christmas, and then again in February and March, right up to the start of the new NRL season. The club needs to put on additional staff at these peak times to handle the call load, which is very straightforward to action through RingCentral. Integration with Salesforce plus RingCentral’s Live Reports ensures an improved customer experience through detailed reporting and analytics, allowing the membership team to see and manage what is happening in the queues – in real-time.

“The combination of digital platforms, including RingCentral and Salesforce, gives us visibility on who we are talking to and the different touch points we are having with them. Our customer service is now at the level where we are going to be the benchmark for NRL clubs going forward,” said Rhys Redfearn, Membership Manager, Parramatta Eels.

Another factor is using technology to enable new and innovative approaches to marketing and customer service. Energy efficiency installation company Accredited Power receives between 400-500 calls a day in its Adelaide contact centre, and is used to advertise its LED replacement offers using national 1300 phone numbers, costing up to $6000 a month to operate. Implementing a RingCentral solution gave Accredited Power the opportunity to advertise using local numbers, immediately saving its monthly 1300 costs and also having a positive impact on the customer experience. In addition, the RingCentral Live Reports dashboard allows Accredited Power’s agents to see the live calls taking place in real-time in the scheduling area, adding to the positive experience.

“On everyone's desk, we have two screens. One screen is for our own internal booking system. The other screen has RingCentral Live Reports continually showing. So now everybody across the organisation has visibility over call queues, and that's very, very important for us. If one of our managers sees six in the queue, they can quickly sort out what’s going on,” said Accredited Power finance director and company secretary Damian Broadbent.

A third key area is how organisations can use reporting and analytics to establish a dedicated customer service function or improve CX over time. The deployment of RingCentral MVP and RingCentral Live Reports for the Australian and New Zealand operations of leading global producer and supplier of stored energy solutions EnerSys has been a test case for its Asia-Pacific region. In addition to consolidating telephony across its manufacturing plants and offices in Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, advanced reporting is already helping the newly established EnerSys ANZ customer care team to start tracking against key calling metrics and KPIs. The plan is for EnerSys to introduce more advanced functionality with the implementation of RingCentral Contact Centre and integration with its core CRM platform later in 2022.

“RingCentral has already transformed our customer service. We now have queues and call flows, and improved management and reporting for our national 1300 and 1800 numbers, which our customer care team can continue to develop and refine as we add new capabilities and functionality,” said EnerSys IT management ANZ Michael Dang.

Customer Service Essentials offers several benefits including:

● Simplifying employee and customer communications through:
○ An integrated phone system with video conferencing, messaging, and SMS so users can easily switch between devices and switch from calls to videos (with powerful AI capabilities) through one single application.
○ Customisable, self-service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) that helps customers accomplish simple, straightforward tasks independently and conveniently.

● Strengthening customer service and staff efficiency through comprehensive and versatile real-time call analytics for IT, customer service teams, sales teams, and others who need data-backed insights.
○ With Live Reports, users now have full visibility into the quality of everyone’s technology experience and can review call and rich-video meeting data to ensure their customers, partners, and employees have the technology and infrastructure they need for quality, non-distracting experiences. They can also easily identify and resolve issues without the need for IT. With Live Reports, users can:

■ Improve customer service quality by monitoring calls and service levels

■ Ensure proper staffing level by analysing queues and spotting emerging patterns
○ Allowing businesses to scale their operations affordably and grow their customer service and sales communications using one secure application from one vendor to improve ROI.
○ Includes over 300 pre-built integrations so you can plug communications into all the apps where work happens and an option to add high-volume SMS. Popular integrations to enable more efficiency and elevate customer service include:

■ Hubspot: Embed calling, SMS, voicemail, and more into your Hubspot to create more efficient workflows

■ Google Suite apps: Streamline workflows to drive productivity across the Google ecosystem with RingCentral

■ Gong: Captures your customer interactions, understands what was said, and delivers insights

Pricing and Availability

RingCentral Customer Service Essentials is available now globally. For more information on Australian pricing, please go here.