RingCentral on Wednesday announced new features for its AI-based contact center offering, RingCX, that included what the firm said is a “real-time AI powered assistant for both agents and supervisors.”
Launched last November, RingCX is described by the company as a “natively built AI-first contact center.” In this update, other new features include AI coaching insights that the company said leverage AI to review all interactions automatically, and a conversational AI platform that allows customers to integrate their preferred intelligent virtual agent (IVA) for customer self-service across both voice and digital channels.
The new capabilities, RingCentral said in a release, come at a time when companies are increasing their investments in AI for customer service. It cited new research from Metrigy that found that organizations plan to up their spending on AI-supported customer self-service this year by 71%, and AI-supported agent assistance by 67%.
Other analysts are in agreement. Jitesh Gera, research manager of unified communications and collaboration at IDC, said, “RingCentral’s announcements are testament to how important it is for UC&C [unified communications and collaboration] companies to enhance their platforms’ customer communication capabilities. Businesses are demanding unified employee and customer communication platforms that are also interoperable with other platforms and customized API-driven applications. And AI capabilities will act as one of the true differentiating factors in this pursuit.”
One customer benefiting from those capabilities is the The Husband and Wife Law Team, a personal injury law firm with locations throughout Arizona.
Joe Phelps, director of operations, client contact, said in an email, “we have a strategic goal this year to utilize AI and other new technologies to deliver improved outcomes for our clients. Our team is measuring the time saved and being intentional about how we give that time back to our staff to build client relationships and spend more time on meaningful work.”
The intent, said Phelps, “is to harness the power of AI to free up extra time for our staff, allowing them to focus on human interactions. That is an essential part of the strategic goal. AI has significantly enhanced efficiency and customer satisfaction when it comes to our call center operations.”
With RingCX, he added, the company is able to answer calls faster, which has nearly eliminated call abandonment, and its outbound queue captures any abandoned calls for immediate callback. “These improvements have led to an 11% point increase in our SLA (speed of answer) metrics and have streamlined our workflows to get calls to the right people faster,” he said.
AI is now an expectation
Shashi Bellamkonda, AI and marketing strategist and principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “I have seen various organizations’ sales or customer experience (CX)/call centers use RingCentral. It is inevitable that they have to introduce an agent-assist model to their CX solution. The primary use case here is for training, coaching, and also intelligently assisting call center agents with information.”
Organizations, said Bellamkonda, “will expect to have these features within the software instead of an upsell. If their current video/call solution doesn’t have assisting technology using AI, companies may elect to have AI point solution providers for this.”
The conversational intelligence solution market, he said, “has many such providers; the winners will be organizations that are multi-modal and can be used across the organization — sales, marketing, customer service, and account management. A potential challenge for RingCentral AI is to avoid being intrusive or annoying, as some customers may feel uncomfortable with having multiple AI notetakers joining their calls and outnumbering human participants.”
And, noted industry analyst Jon Arnold, principal of J. Arnold Associates, since RingCentral has no intention of competing with NICE or Genesys in the high-end enterprise CX space, but targets mid-market organizations, “they can reach a pretty broad swath of the market with this offering.”
