Businesses are facing many challenges today. The pressure on CIOs to deliver digital dividends is higher than ever. What are digital dividends? They’re about using digital technologies to accelerate growth and augment workflows beyond what was originally possible. This week at Enterprise Connect 2023 in Orlando, Florida, I presented a keynote with my recommendations on yielding digital dividends and also took the audience through RingCentral’s big announcements.
Let’s take a look at these recommendations that will help organizations:
- achieve more with AI and data-driven insights;
- connect more by unifying your workforce;
- engage more from the frontline to the back office;
- integrate more with the apps your business wants to use;
- deliver fantastic experiences.
Recommendation #1 – Intelligent:
AI was clearly the talk of the show at Enterprise Connect. Every decade or so, a new technology emerges that is truly disruptive. Watching the excitement for AI over the last few months, I’m reminded of other moments that captured the public’s imagination. One comparison is that this moment for AI is akin to what the Ford Model T was in 1908 when it was first introduced. It impressed the public at the time, but people had no idea how far and wide it would transform transportation and open the floodgates of automotive innovation. That’s where we are with AI now – at the very early stages. The floodgates are just opening for AI-centric innovation – innovation that will be here for many years to come.
Like many other leading technology providers, we’re building our own AI platform. What makes us unique and qualified to do it? We’re the leader in voice. Voice is the key underlying core component of what we deliver as part of our world-leading Cloud PBX. Natural language, and voice in particular, has always been a universal interface for information, intent, and emotion – and yet has been largely inaccessible at scale.
What if businesses could access their portion of conversations taking place on our platform to gain insights and improve effectiveness? That’s what we are bringing to market with RingSense.
Introduction of RingSense
Our vision for RingSense is simple – to inject AI across our portfolio and transform employee productivity, customer support, sales, and frontline workers’ use cases across vertical industries.
RingSense leverages our own native generative AI technologies, and is flexible enough to dock into other commercial large language models to meet various customer use cases. With RingSense, our plan is to make all voice, meeting, and messaging interactions more intelligent so customers can automatically uncover new, actionable insights to improve efficiencies and performance, gather insights, and take better-informed next steps.
As part of our launch of RingSense, we also introduced RingSense for Sales. We want to give every salesperson and every sales manager superpowers to help them close more deals, faster. It senses critical needs and enhances the salesperson’s ability to close a deal, by proactively delivering insights from conversations, and automating meeting notes, while providing coaching, analysis, and recommendations for the next steps.
Sales is only our first use case of RingSense. There is more to come, as we plan to make intelligence a fundamental component of our business communications platform.
Recommendation #2 – Connected:
The enemy of achieving digital dividends is siloed communications. Silos create inefficiencies and open the door to lost revenue and unnecessary spending. Metrigy, an independent analyst research firm, did a workplace study and found there are 2.7 billion frontline workers– more than 2X the number of desk-based workers. But, when it comes to prioritizing investments for those closest to customers, frontline workers are often overlooked. In fact, only 21% have deployed a mobile UCaaS application. These gaps in technological disparities across an organization’s workforce create inefficiencies that create unnecessary drag.
Introduction of RingCentral for Frontline Workers
In order to help organizations transform their frontline workforce, I showcased RingCentral for Frontline Workers, a next-gen communications solution that will boost efficiency by unifying an organization’s entire workforce – bridging communications gaps between back office and frontline workers with new features like push to talk, which can be combined with MVP or used as a standalone solution. Connecting the frontline to the back office is key to engaging more and creating better customer experiences.
Integrate More With Greater Composability
Connecting your people across an organization is just as important as connecting your applications. RingCentral offers a robust open platform ecosystem with many No Code, Low Code, and Pro Code options for our customers and developers. The idea behind it is simple – you don’t need to be a developer to create integrations and workflows with the RingCentral platform.
At Enterprise Connect, RingCentral also introduced three new additions to our highly composable platform:
- AI APIs: Allows customers to access their conversations, and transcriptions, summarizations, emotion detection, and interaction analysis.
- Video SDK: Allows customers to build and elevate their own high-quality, secure video apps and products.
- Digital Channel APIs: Extends digital channel capabilities across Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, and other digital channels.
And I can’t talk about our platform without giving a nod to our Microsoft Teams integrations, which is one of our most popular integrations that complements the collaboration capabilities of Teams with RingCentral’s best-in-class voice quality. During the keynote, I highlighted a newly revamped RingCentral for Microsoft Teams experience that is coming soon, which will bring even more deeper, more advanced integration capabilities and mobility right where your collaboration hub is.
Recommendation #3 – Experiences
We believe that delivering fantastic user experiences is essential for yielding digital dividends. One area we’re continuously focusing on improving is the RingCentral user experience. Where there’s an opportunity to remove friction and create more seamless experiences is where we are hyper-focused.
Dynamic and Adaptive Experiences
During the keynote, I showed a video to highlight the next evolution of RingCentral MVP. We’ve doubled down on making the app experience modern, dynamic, and adaptive to reduce friction across workflows. Available soon, our goal with this new version is to make it easier to use than ever—because communications should adapt to us, not the other way around.
Raising the Bar: RingCentral Webinar
I also highlighted the importance of giving our customers the option to connect with their audiences over Webinar. Many competing webinar solutions are unnecessarily difficult to use and clumsy. We set out to reinvent the Webinar experience – so it’s as easy as starting a video meeting.
We’re almost ready to take the beta wrapper off of RingCentral Webinar and we gave the Enterprise Connect audience a sneak peek of the new GA version of RingCentral Webinar, and as part of that, we talked about a new Webinar beta experience for Marketers that makes it easier to generate. More details are coming next month when we officially launch these exciting enhancements, so stay tuned.
All In One Customer Experiences
We can’t close the experience topic without talking about customer experiences. RingCentral has the broadest and deepest portfolio of integrated customer experience solutions to address every use case in contact centers. From managing the digital interactions coming through a 30+ digital channel solution; to turning a contact center into a true profit center with outbound solutions; or an all-in, full-fledged multi-site enterprise-grade contact center addressing the most complex use cases with deeply integrated workforce management capabilities. And, these offerings serve the unique needs of customers all the way from SMBs to Global 1000 companies.
By creating the most seamless UCaaS and CCaaS combo on the market, our customers gain significant value by investing in this combination – which leads to having an entire workforce in lock-step, poised to best serve their customers, fuel growth, and deliver digital dividends.
It’s a Wrap
Highlighting these exciting offerings from RingCentral is more than just showing messages, video, phone, and contact center. It’s a whole lot more, and our introduction of new solutions like RingSense is about ushering in a new era of Intelligent, Connected Experiences.
To learn more, watch Mo Katibeh’s entire keynote presentation from Enterprise Connect 2023:
Originally published Mar 28, 2023, updated Aug 06, 2024
