Cloud communications are the future. Infonetics Research forecasts that by next year, cloud PBX and unified communications will be a $15B industry, as businesses of all sizes transition from hardware PBX phone systems to cloud-based platforms. This shift is driven primarily by advanced features and lowered costs. But in order to fully benefit from the power of the cloud, businesses need to be able to extend it with new features and integrate communications with existing business solutions. Maximizing the value of a cloud communications system requires an extensible platform based on open standards and APIs.
RingCentral recognizes the needs of businesses of all sizes to increase both employee productivity and customer satisfaction, while simultaneously reducing the time it takes to integrate communications into existing workflows. To address these issues, RingCentral offers tight integration with many of today’s most popular business apps, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Box, and Google Google Workspace. These powerful integrations enable your company to streamline communication and collaboration, so your employees can work more efficiently and connect more easily with both customers and colleagues.
Additionally, RingCentral has created an open, self-service platform that allows developers to build their own integrations. This open platform offers an unprecedented level of customization while making it fast and easy to add significant value to their own business applications. RingCentral Connect Platform is composed of a suite of tools and services to build, deploy, and manage custom integrations using RingCentral APIs. Connect Platform includes a developer portal, a set of self-service APIs, SDKs, a sandbox environment, and tutorials. It provides extensive developer support, documentation, and a forum where developers can get answers to their questions. An App Gallery also offers a steadily growing array of prebuilt apps for integrating everything from mobile to CRM capabilities.
Use Cases
Using Connect Platform, developers can quickly and easily build custom integrations with the RingCentral system to add powerful communication capabilities to business applications. Here are some examples of common custom service integrations.
1) CRM
Many CRM deployments still rely on users manually entering data to initiate and track phone calls, SMS messages, faxes, or paging. Using Connect Platform, developers can integrate communications directly into key CRM processes to maximize efficiencies and boost business outcomes. For example, a recent addition to the growing RingCentral Connect App Gallery is Callinize for RingCentral, a suite of high- quality integrations that connect the RingCentral service with SugarCRM, Infusionsoft, Insightly, Zoho, Salesforce, and other leading CRMs.
2) SMS and Fax
Many consumers prefer to communicate by SMS, and businesses want to capitalize on this highly responsive way to connect with their customers. In addition, fax still has an important function in many fields. Text messaging and online faxes offer quick ways to get important information, such as confirmations or authorizations. The RingCentral Connect Platform makes it simple to integrate fax and SMS functionality directly into a variety of core business applications, providing a secure and reliable way to communicate with customers. For example, sales, service, and marketing professionals could increase response time by sending SMS or faxes directly from their back-office applications.
3) Click-to-dial
For employees who spend much of their time making phone calls, manually dialing numbers on a keypad or repeatedly copying and pasting phone numbers into softphone apps can become a very tedious and error-prone task. Integrating the RingCentral click-to-dial functionality with common front-office applications allows employees to make calls simply by clicking a phone number, which means they save time and make fewer errors. This simple API integration typically saves sales and service representatives up to an hour a day in lost productivity.
4) Reporting
Every day, companies engage in a high volume of voice calls, text messages, and faxes as an integral part of getting work done. By collecting and analyzing communication data, businesses can gain valuable insights for planning current and future business needs. However, with manual processes, much of this potentially valuable data is either lost or entered incorrectly. RingCentral reporting automatically captures call, text, and fax data and provides usage analysis and trending metrics in customizable, easy-to-read views. Tightly integrating RingCentral Reports into front-office applications, business intelligence tools, and dashboards allows businesses to easily access these valuable insights and enrich their understanding of how their companies communicate.
RingCentral cloud communications and our Connect Platform for developers streamline custom service integrations. As a result, your business can quickly reap the benefits of greater productivity and increased customer satisfaction by infusing communications into your workflows. Check out our Integrations page for case studies and to learn more about how RingCentral’s open integrations can benefit your business.
Originally published Jan 25, 2017, updated Sep 17, 2020
