Summary Bullets:

• RingCentral has expanded its partnerships with Cox Business and Spectrum Business by augmenting existing unified communications offers with contact center capabilities.
• Now is an especially opportune time to expand the partnerships as organizations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections.

RingCentral has recently expanded its partnership with two service providers by supplying contact center capabilities for their portfolios. ‘Cox Business Contact Center with RingCentral’ and ‘Unified Customer Experience (UCX) with RingCentral’ from Spectrum Business both leverage RingCentral’s ‘RingCX’ platform, which is AI-driven and omnichannel capable. Both offers complement existing unified communications (UC) offers brought to market in conjunction with RingCentral based on its ‘RingEX’ platform namely, ‘Cox Business Connect with RingCentral’ and from Spectrum Business, ‘Unified Communications (UC) with RingCentral’. Spectrum Business sweetens the deal by blending in a sales-oriented add-on from RingCentral to its UC offer called AI Conversation Expert (ACE), which transcribes and analyzes sales calls and meetings to help close more opportunities.

The partnerships reflect the fact that vendors and service providers see the UC and contact center spaces as key growth markets. Both parties reap specific benefits from the alliances. Vendors such as RingCentral benefit by gaining access to the service providers’ customer bases and thus broadening their addressable market. Service providers benefit by expanding the portfolio of services they can provide to their customers. However, making the deal practical for service providers requires an additional layer. Simply reselling the licenses that enable access to vendor platforms is economically challenging as margins on those licenses are svelte. So, service providers make it a habit of scooping additional value atop the ‘sundae’, such as offering to manage the services residing on the platforms, selling accompanying services such as voice, and providing professional services such as consulting and integration.

Irrespective of the rationales behind each party’s motivation for jumping into the fray, now is a very opportune time for them to do so. Today, organizations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections. To meet that demand, contact centers have been undergoing a profound transformation, with the concept of a ‘contact center’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’ (CX). Contact centers are converting from featuring live agents to also including AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalized.

Given the importance of customer experience in the market and to help organizations make the transition to it, vendors such as RingCentral and service providers such as Cox Business and Spectrum Business have been rolling out a stream of contact center capabilities and will surely continue to do so.