The key priority for RingCentral and our partners in Australia is how we support organisations as they adapt to a new hybrid way of working. We want to meet the customer where they want to work and how they want to communicate. That’s not just the physical location; it’s also their choice of application and user interface – which might be to work within the RingCentral app, Microsoft Teams or their preferred web browser, CRM or productivity suite. Ultimately, our goal is to make sure that we achieve participation equity for the workforce no matter where they are, or what device or application they are using.
Currently, most of our unified communications and contact centre development efforts are being put behind innovation to improve the experience, safety and wellbeing of users. That includes solutions to enable touchless features for meeting rooms and a focus on improving the participant experience on mobile devices.
We saw the urgent need for enterprise-grade telephony to support the urgent shift to cloud in early 2020 and re-prioritised our developments to release RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams. This ensured that customers could continue to use the platform with which their users had become familiar, and support this with a more robust, integrated voice and video communications platform.
There are also a lot of exciting developments in the area of artificial intelligence (AI). A good example is our most recent release which enhances the STIR/SHAKEN call authentication framework in the US to stop unwanted robocalls and spam. This uses AI to more accurately authenticate and verify traffic routed through our platform to stop these unwanted calls and build trust and security for end-consumers. These spam calls are a significant problem here too. For example, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Scamwatch reported that in 2020, phone calls were the number one method for scammers to use representing 47.7%, or 103,153 scams, of the total number of scams reported to the organisation.
The advantages of RingCentral’s cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform is that innovations like these can be quickly rolled out when available to all existing users and customers start to feel liberated when these rapid changes come at them head on.
Even for those organisations with a strong preference to maintain their on-premise or hosted IT infrastructure see UCaaS and CCaaS adoption as a no-brainer – particularly RingCentral as the industry’s leading UCaaS solution – which Synergy founder and chief analyst Jeremy Duke says is “in a field of its own”.
This is why UCaaS is a $1billion addressable market in Australia alone. RingCentral’s clear advantage is that we combine the carrier-grade reliability worldwide (99.999% uptime SLA) with the flexibility, integration and access to ongoing innovation of cloud.
Importantly, being a cloud-based solution doesn’t take our partners out of the equation. In fact, the role for our reseller and integrator partners in supporting our integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solutions has never been more important.
Your key role is to be the trusted advisor to your clients; to really understand the current and future states of your customers, and then to align yourself with providers that have a strong history of delivering innovation against the broader IT application marketplace. RingCentral is a great place to start.
Originally published 02 Dec, 2021, updated 06 Dec, 2021
