Summary Bullets:
• Customer Service Essentials reflects a growing propensity among vendors for combining contact center and unified communications capabilities in a single offer.
• Customer Service Essentials lets smaller businesses dip their toe in the contact center waters, but it is merely a pricing bundle at its core.
RingCentral recently launched Customer Service Essentials, a contact center offering targeted at the small office/home office (SOHO) and small business markets. Customer Service Essentials bundles RingCentral’s flagship ‘MVP (Message, Video, and Phone)’ offer and Live Reports, which provides real-time call center performance data.
Customer Service Essentials is the latest step in the expansion of RingCentral’s portfolio that has solidified its position in the cloud-based collaboration market. The portfolio has grown beyond the RingCentral Glip chat service to include messaging, video meetings, and phone under its MVP offer, as well as team collaboration and contact center capabilities. A separate – but equally significant – component has been generating co-branded offers through partnerships with vendors ALE, Atos, Avaya, and Mitel, as well as service providers such as AT&T, Telus, and Verizon.
However, Customer Service Essentials is more than just the freshest jewel in RingCentral’s crown: its greatest significance lies in the size of its target market, the growing importance of contact centers, and a trend among vendors to offer joint contact center and unified communications offers.
The SOHO and SMB markets, which Customer Service Essentials is intended for, represent a significant opportunity according to statistics recently reported by GlobalData. In total, those markets represent a growing proportion of businesses worldwide (please see: “Enterprise Telecoms Market – Where Do We Go from Here?”). Small businesses in particular are estimated to exceed 30 million in the US and 400 million globally and, according to the World Bank, account for 90% of all businesses and more than 50% of employment (please see: “Why Telcos Struggle to Thrive in the Small Business Market”). The appeal to RingCentral is plain to see.
RingCentral is introducing the offer during a crucial juncture for contact centers. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, contact centers have become more central to managing the customer experience. Contact centers (1) have expanded from brick-and-mortar environments to virtual ones; (2) support channels beyond traditional voice (including chat, SMS, email, video, and social media); (3) have coupled multi-channel support with customers’ growing appetite for remote engagement; and (4) have become more efficient at resolving customer issues through heavy use of AI.
At the same time, there has been a growing propensity among vendors for combining contact center and unified communications capabilities in a single offer; Customer Service Essentials reflects that trend. Technology linking agents with subject matter experts (SMEs) has made every employee potentially customer-impacting. In this scenario, agents and SMEs exchange information in a shared space to resolve customer issues. In addition to providing a richer customer experience, pairing unified communications and contact center capabilities can capture intricate details of business operations through sophisticated reporting as well as technology such as AI.
Despite the benefits, Customer Service Essentials is not without drawbacks. At its core, the offering is merely a pricing bundle. In addition, with only a sliver of contact center capability, the offer is not as robust as those from vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, and 8×8 (or other offers from RingCentral for that matter) that combine unified communications and contact center capabilities more deeply.
The bottom line though is that Customer Service Essentials provides an avenue for smaller businesses to dip their toe in the contact center waters, and that’s a good thing. Plus, given the size of the target market, it is well worth RingCentral’s time and effort to see if Customer Service Essentials will entice customers to dive headfirst into its more substantial contact center offers.