It’s no longer just “nice” for call center agents to provide an exceptional contact center experience—it’s vital. According to the report, 2022 June Market Study: CX Trends, Challenges & Opportunities by CCW, a staggering 60% of consumers say they would switch to a competitor after just one or two bad experiences.
Luckily, RingCentral has 10 new tools and features to help your service team strengthen your contact center experience and keep your customers productive, knowledgeable, and satisfied.
We’ve broken these new features down into a few helpful categories:
- Features to help reduce operating costs
- Integrations to unify contact center information
- Self-service tools for better customer experience
- Call center software to empower agents
Let’s take a deeper look at our 2022 innovations for a better customer experience and how they can help you improve your contact center solutions. Watch the video or read on below!
RingCentral features to help reduce operating costs
Distribution and operational costs are on the rise, and according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index increased 7.5% from January 2021 to January 2022—the biggest yearly increase in 40 years. Companies—including contact centers—are under immense pressure to tighten their belts and reduce spending. Now more than ever, it’s crucial that organizations get more value out of their existing tools and find creative ways to reduce operating costs—without damaging the quality of their service.
RingCentral has products that can help CX leaders and support teams take full advantage of their cloud contact center tools.
1. Engage Voice Analytics
Engage Voice, an outbound and blended contact center solution, has enhanced analytics that can help you improve your agents’ performance and increase your operational efficiency. Contact center technology leaders and teams can gain new, enhanced insights through metrics and reports and a dashboard that brings them all together in one convenient place.
With Engage Voice Analytics, you can now track and improve your outbound agents’ top activities—dialed calls, answered calls, completed calls, talk time, and more—and most common outbound dispositions—like leads generated, follow-ups, and opt-outs. These analytics will provide information about customer engagement, hold times, and call distribution among agents in support ticket queues.
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1/3 of your customers will leave after just one bad experience! See how RingCentral contact center helped these 6 companies better serve their customers
2. 4,000 free minutes per user with Engage Voice “Standalone”
With Engage Voice “Standalone,” your team gets 4,000 free minutes per user. These minutes can be used for both inbound and outbound domestic traffic, so 4,000 minutes of calls to and from customers in the U.S. and Canada are free for each of your agents. This offer helps contact centers improve customer communications while also reducing operational costs.
This Engage Voice feature also includes a “Transport Overview” dashboard in addition to “Billing Period Account Overview” and “Billing Period Account Usage” dashboards. These dashboards and the reports they generate help you review your RingCentral subscription utilization so you can adapt it based on your team’s specific needs.
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RingCentral integrations to unify contact center information
By integrating customer service tools within a central platform, organizations can provide a more seamless contact center experience and ensure agents have access to the critical customer data they need to solve issues on first contact. RingCentral has new integration-based features that help agents do just that.
3. Bring Your Own Surveys
With RingCentral’s Bring Your Own Surveys API, your contact center can integrate any survey provider into Engage Digital and aggregate customer feedback directly within our platform. The Bring Your Own Surveys feature triggers and records survey responses automatically so you can easily gather feedback to improve your customers’ experiences.
With RingCentral’s Bring Your Own Surveys API and automation, contact center leaders and teams can get more value from the tools they’re already using.
4. WhatsApp Outbound
Use WhatsApp through Engage Digital to send messages directly to consumers through WhatsApp’s API. This integration allows you to start conversations, and engage one-on-one with your customers through Engage Digital and WhatsApp. Support leaders and contact center agents can determine a specific trigger and use WhatsApp to push proactive outbound notifications to targeted customers. Charges are based on WhatsApp’s pricing model.
WhatsApp Outbound through Engage Digital also includes usage analytics and enables teams to set up reminders, sales follow-ups, alerts, and more. Charges are based on WhatsApp’s pricing model.
RingCentral tools to help customers with self-service
Many customers now prefer to try to handle problems themselves without having to reach out to a support agent. As Geeta Menon, RingCentral’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, explained in our recent webinar, 80% of contact center users prefer to begin with digital customer interactions before they have to switch to any other communication channels (e.g., contacting a live agent). So, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to provide a variety of resources like knowledge bases, intelligent virtual agents, and chatbots.
RingCentral has self-service tools that can improve customer expectations by helping them find what they need without the help of agents.
5. Bot Builder
RingCentral’s Bot Builder allows you to create, test, and deploy your own customized omnichannel “smart” bot—no coding required. Our tool’s bots can quickly answer simple customer inquiries and take care of redundant tasks, like resetting customer passwords, freeing up agents to handle more complex and value-added activities.
Support teams can also fine-tune Bot Builder’s smart bots to recognize industry terms and company-specific formats. With this feature, your technical support team can offer your customers self-service and save time, money, and improve your bottom line.
6. Guide
RingCentral’s Guide is a proactive pop-up tool that provides contextual self-service—in the form of links, live chat, virtual assistants, and knowledge banks—along a customer’s journey. Guide is specifically tailored for web and mobile experiences and provides the customer success resources needed to solve issues digitally—without the need to speak directly to an agent.
Guide is designed to help customers get what they need as easily as possible, which improves customer retention. With Guide, agents can also see a customer’s journey, so if it’s necessary, they can jump in and anticipate customer needs or take proactive steps to solve issues before they arise.
Guide delivers the right information to your customers at the right time. When customers are able to get answers quickly without involving agents, conversions tend to increase. Geeta Menon explains in our feature release webinar that with this tool, companies see a 700% ROI.
7. SmartAssist
SmartAssist is an intelligent virtual agent that’s available to customers 24/7. It recognizes natural language, customer sentiment, and context, so it’s able to accurately answer many contact center questions and limit call escalation and routing to live agents. For complex problems, SmartAssist can transfer the issue to live agents with full context.
The SmartAssist bot can also handle context-switching and is integrated with more than 50 back-end systems, so it can easily find information and provide customers with the answers they need.
While agents are busy with higher-value tasks, SmartAssist can take care of many customer questions at once, so it decreases staffing and operational costs while providing a better digital journey. As Geeta Menon shares in our newest webinar, the SmartAssist bot increases first contact resolution (FCR) by 20%.
8. Self-service Analytics
RingCentral’s Self-service Analytics helps support teams see customer journeys and if or where they escalate to a live agent or abandon a call. This analytics tool helps you identify issues in your Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, service flows. IVR helps callers navigate phone-based self-service.
Armed with these insights, your teams can make informed updates to your IVR to optimize customers’ self-service experiences.
RingCentral call center software to empower agents
Agent burnout and high turnover make it difficult for contact centers to provide a consistent, high-quality support experience. RingCentral provides tools that help agents resolve customer issues smoothly, so CX teams are more likely to enjoy their work and stay at your contact center.
9. Real-time Interaction Guidance and Behavioral Coaching
RingCentral’s Real-time Interaction Guidance (RTIG) and Behavioral Coaching uses AI to track customer sentiment and agent behavior during interactions. For example, the Real-time Interaction Guidance and Behavioral Coaching feature can notice when customer service agents aren’t showing enough empathy and will coach them to ask customers more questions. It can also recognize when agents are speaking too fast, not listening, or other actions that could be improved.
Leadership teams can use the RTIG dashboard to explore trends and use this information to personalize training for more effective results. Because the RTIG guides agents on processes, compliance, and multiple soft skills, it helps to improve employee satisfaction (ESAT) and customer satisfaction (CSAT).
10. Agent Assist
RingCentral’s Agent Assist empowers agents by serving up the information they need to respond to customers accurately and quickly. Agent Assist works across both voice and chat.
When agents have immediate access to critical customer information, it not only reduces their stress but also helps your company improve ESAT, CSAT, and FCR.
Elevate your contact center experience with RingCentral
Delivering exceptional customer support is hard, but with RingCentral, it doesn’t have to be. We’re constantly evolving our products to provide customer support teams with the features, integrations, tools, and contact center software they need to combat communication challenges and elevate their contact center experience—for both customers and for agents.
We’re taking huge strides to make communication simpler—and more enjoyable—for everyone, and these updates are just the first step. Hear the full webinar to learn more about these new features.
Originally published Jul 20, 2022, updated Jan 17, 2024