RingCentral Office

RingCentral was very easy to setup for our local office as well as remote employees. We mainly went with RingCentral for this functionality. I could order and ship a phone to a remote employee or set up a phone number for remote employee without them needing a phone and all they would have to do is plug in the phone or log in to RingCentral to get going. Call routing and everything else was seamless to the remote employees.

There is a bit of a learning curve in configuring the different groups. The customer success team is there to help you get started over the phone and generally available to help whenever needed. It was a bit of a pain to get started, but this was in 2015. It was quite a few emails back and forth with an account rep to get the right plan and block of numbers.

The ability to configure the platform as required to meet your business requirements. We use it to handle all inbound calls and can route them to mobile phone, desktops and to voice mail boxes as required. With the seamless integration with Office 365 and with Salesforce we are really well positioned to automate more while providing an excellent experience for our customers.

At first, it may appear to be difficult to set-up, but after some trials and finding some of the pitfalls we managed to get it operating how we wanted to. Our business is primarily Mac-based, so it is different from Windows. We had a couple of glitches during the early days when upgrading to the latest MacOS but these did get fixed.

RingCentral is a unified communication system. All types of communications stay in a single software. It's great to give a business partner your office number that they could call, text or fax. Video conferencing is easy. RingCentral can be used from a web browser, desktop application, tablet app or a phone app. The unification of all these communication in one spot makes it easy for business partners and customers to work with us.

RingCentral's video conferencing software and company chat system has opportunities for improvement. Video conference quality is not at par with Zoom. Company chat system is great but not as smooth and elegant as Slack. Those are two areas for improvement.

RingCentral has a handful of pros that make the software great and very ideal for doing business. To begin, RingCentral has a mobile phone app that can easily be downloaded on Apple or Android that completely integrates with the calling system on the device. The software gives you a completely new phone line that we used as work lines but the calls come right through on your existing device. As incoming calls come in, your phone indicates that its a call to the RingCentral line which made deciding when to accept a call very convenient. The software includes all the regular features of a phone, such as voicemail. When voicemail messages were left, I would also receive a notification email to my work email that had the audio message included and could listen right on the computer if I wanted to. Furthermore, the best pro I experienced with RingCentral was the ability to complete International calling and texting, both incoming and outgoing. This was the driving factor in me adopting the software and it worked perfectly. I was able to receive international calls without always needing to arrange a scheduled conference call. This made business very convenient. Discovering that I could text internationally through the RingCentral app was a great bonus!

What I've liked least about RingCentral are more so areas of improvement rather than full blown cons. Most notably, while the mobile app does integrate well and gets the job done, it can often times lag and be a bit clunky. Overall, the app lacks a sense of intuitiveness that proved challenging. Discovering and completing texting through the app, especially internationally, was very much not straightforward or easy to complete and required digging and research on my end. RingCentral even updated their app, creating a new one entirely, but the old app is also still active and both remain on my phone and it's unclear as to which should be used as it appears that both are fully functioning. Ultimately, I suppose the mobile app is the greatest con that RingCentral faces.