My experience with Ring Central

Pros

We own a installation business that installs different products for 5-7 Big Box Home Improvement Centers. We bought a new home in a different area code and poor landline phone service. Changing your phone number with a Big Box company is difficult and produces a lag time in several areas including fax and invoice payments from the Big Box. Before the move I heard about Ring Central from a competitor Installer. Most of our work came in over a fax machine at that time and when we vacationed or spent days away from the office it was hard to continue business. With Ring central all faxes come over your phone, much like a email and you can forward them to the different subcontractors right from your cell phone, taking your office with you wherever you go. Additionally, we did not have to change our office land line number when we moved but with the cloud system offered thru Ring central we were able to have all land line calls come thru our cell phone in addition to calls generated by people dialing our cell phone number. All this at very reasonable prices. I do not have to pay for land line service or fax service, but am able to fax from my cell phone or computer. Ring Central has been a life saver and very convenient for my home business.

Cons

When talking to customers or coworker thru land line cloud phone numbers---If a call comes in over cell phone, the cell phone call takes leadership and often interupts cloud system calls in progress and disconnects calls over land line number. Inconvenient.

Ring Central for Medium Businesses

We use RingCentral daily as our main phone system and we have a customer call center that uses the phone system very heavily. In general we have not had any major downtime with RingCentral but we do have the strange glitches that cause some users headaches trying to get the softphone to work correctly for them. The phone system works most of the time but because we use Plantronics headsets there can be some tricky configuration that users have difficulties with from time to time.

Pros

RingCentral Softphone app is similar to a cell phone which makes it easy for people to relate to the functions of the softphone app. We use Glip, the messaging system that is part of the RingCentral phone app every day and we particularly like the gif feature that allows you to search for gifs and post them to chat. I also like that you can have the RingCentral phone app on both your desktop or laptop computer and your cell phone and you can transfer calls between the two devices pretty easily. The contacts tab on the softphone app is also a great feature that allows us to search for anyone in the company's number easily and quickly and is a great improvement over our last voip system.

Cons

There are a lot of strange glitches with RingCentral that happen, like when a user cannot make or receive phone calls and the only way to fix the issue is to reboot the user's computer (only seen on Windows 7 computers).We have also had strange issue where a user is not logged into a queue and is set to busy or do not disturb as their status and they get missed calls even though their phone never rang. The support and web results for any issue you search for are not helpful and definitely seem to be filtered to make it seem that there are no issues with the RingCentral softphone app. I also do not like how the phone app will take over my keyboard when I get a call and stop me from completing whatever I was typing when the call came in.

One of the most complete easy to use fully cloud solutions out there

If you are starting out, you might want to try a cheaper provider first, or bundle with Office 365 if you already have that. I know this is a solid solution. I've never had the chance to use anything else for VoIP, but I know this will get certainly get the job done well. I would have no reservations going into this at all if you need to make a quick decision. This company will be able to handle your system and do everything you need within reason.

Pros

No need to have anything but a desk phone, computer, or mobile device, and the internet to make it work. It is very feature-rich. They work with many phones, even others like Microsoft say are not compatible. If you have a bunch of old equipment that won't work with another cloud provider, RC will be one of your best bets to work with your hardware. If even they don't work with your devices, you probably need to get rid of your archaic technology. Provision is very quick and easy. Their chat support has less than a 10-minute wait, usually no wait. Their support is very capable. They handle all firmware upgrades automatically, at least with our VVX phones.

Cons

Cost much more than a locally-hosted system but I think if money is not an issue, it's much better to let your company do what it does best, and let RC do what it does best. Don't try to be a VoIP provider company just for yourselves. Let the pros do it (unless if you're a VERY large company maybe).
Don't pay crazy more for phones from them, just buy them on Amazon and provision them yourself in about three minutes. For rare, advanced problems, sometimes their support drops the ball and you need to contact your account manager. Sometimes he'll be out of the office for several days though. Anytime we've had more than two phones down, they have been able to solve our problems by the next morning, even for CRAZY issues. Most of the time support is very great and I recommend it.

Expensive, but worth it if you abuse the system.

We are able to easily communicate (and keep track of our communications) in voice and text from opposite sides of the world without anyone calling in having any indication that we're not all in the same time zone.

Pros

RingCentral allows a far-flung Internet-based company to act like a local company in terms of having a local number to call (and call from), while allowing you to quickly and flawlessly transfer callers between extensions even if those extensions are on opposite sides of the planet. It also records all of your texts and calls, allowing you to download and save them for future needs, which is vital in any litigation-sensitive business like property management.

On the level of an individual worker, the ability to mix and match a SoftPhone (on your PC), the RingCentral app (on your mobile device), plus seamlessly forward calls from your landline *and* make a VoiP call that then forwards *your end* of that call to your landline and allows you to have the conversation over the phone like normal.

Cons

Really, the only problem with RingCentral is the price. The price per person per month is steep enough that a smaller company has to really be careful with who they give extensions to, and the limitation to two SoftPhone installs per extension means you can't really use an extension for a whole department or team. Right now, for example, my Marketing team has 3 full-time and 1 part-time worker, but the company can only afford one extension for all of the marketing, so I can't even install a SoftPhone on my desktop and my laptop, because the other one of our SoftPhones is installed on a computer in the Philippines so that we have multiple people who can answer the phone in case one is busy.

Oh, and I have had occasional problems where texting a RingCentral number from a service like Google Voice will flat-out not work, and we can't figure out why. But that's a really minor complaint, all things considered. :)

Rock Solid VoIP with great features, but on the expensive side

It's really quite something to have a portable phone system that you can use on any device that can access the internet.

Pros

Never had any downtime with RingCentral, which is a big deal to compensate for the fact that we all work remotely. It's important to feel that we can JUST call.

We had the occasional weird softrware incompatibility issues withe some USB headsets with the Softphones, but besides that, it felt like it just worked.

We have always been able to set up any menu tree, any re-routing option, any special hours of operation we wanted to, in order to suit our occasional business quirks.

They have also been quite flexible with our contract, with the occasional downgrade, even when they did not have to.

RingCentral also helps us comply with HIPAA standard, which allows us to have health-realted video calls with our clients on a secure platform. The video calls are really quite good, with little to no lag. RingCentral Meetings seems to be another one of their services that seems to just work.

The admin portal seems to get better and better, and easier and easier to use. Even though it has a very extensive list of features and options, we seem to be able to manage each individual line ourselves almost all the time and do everything we need to without calling tech support for help.

Cons

The only cons I can think of are the price (although not as high as 8x8) and the occasional (quite rare, really) long wait time to call support.

It can feel a bit overwhelming at first because of all the options and features, but once the initial setup is done, it should be fine.

Beyond VOIP service a whole business suite

I am able to have access to phone call's pretty much anywhere I go and if I am not near one of the numbers I have set up, I will be notified of message's and be able to check them from all my devices. With the glimp chat interface you can keep in text message contact with team members from your computer or cell phone and if someone does not have Ring Central it's not a problem for they can just download glimp and your in business.

Pros

There are so many things that are pros for this software. One of the best things is being able to take a call from multi devices. You can have a softphone (On your computer), physical phone and an app for your cell phone. The configurations are limitless on how you want an inbound call to be routed. The other great feature is being able to fax from your cell phone or your computer via the soft phone. When it comes to notifications, you can get them via SMS, email or both. If you have a team then your really in business for they have GLIMP which is a message service you can use on either your computer or smartphone. The best part is if someone does not have a RingCentral service, not a problem, they can just download the app and your messaging. Lastly the service staff are very helpful and will walk you thru any issue your having and will also teach you if you want to learn.

Cons

If you're going to use the shared line group and have a firewall make sure you get all the ACL IP's for they have a lot and they change often and RingCentral is not good at keeping you updated.

RingCentral for meetings

Ringcentral meetings give us the opportunity to connect with our clients in an effective way. Also, it s great to use inside our company to connect our offices over the world.

Pros

I´ve been using RingCentral at work since I got hired in the Company. For me it has been an important tool since the majority of our clients are contacted via telephone conferences. Also, ringcentral is very helpful for us because we have 2 main locations Miami and Bogota and we use it to comunicate between both offices the entire day. Ringcentral is very helpful in situations in which you need to connect your clients with people in different offices. Even if you don´t use the video feature you know who is speaking because the name of the person appears in the entire screen (which is super usefull if you are connected which several persons at the same time). I had also use it via cellphone and it is super easy to use, you only need to call a particular number and then mark the code of the meeting, for me this is important in cases when I have a meeting but I´m in the middle of traffic or something similar. Ringcentral also offers you the opportunity to share your screen so everyone in the meeting can see your presentations and you can even give them the control of your screen so they can make changes directly to any document if you need it, we use this feature between the teams in Bogota and Miami and it is super usefull because we can work in several things at the same time.

Cons

I don´t have any complaints about this software, for me it has been very helpful.

Overall great solution for business phone service

Overall good product but there is a learning curve on the setup (Complex interface) and their phone support isn't great

Pros

Very powerful solution that can be fully managed through their online interface. I like the support of all of the Polycom phones, support for presence, call queue setups, schedules, etc. It's a very comprehensive system that does a LOT.

Cons

Two issues we have.....

1) We used to use phone.com and we found we had better control of the call flow using their system. We've run into some call flow planning issues due to limitations of Ring Central.

2) WOW their customer support is bad bad bad! At least I just had a terrible experience. We hired a new employee and I needed to setup his phone. We had an existing line setup that we weren't using. I just needed to update the line to use his new phone. It wouldn't let me add his phone to the existing line and wanted me to make a new line. I did that and then I had two lines on the extension. I tried to delete one of the extensions and it said I cannot. I call support and the lady on the phone said she "Ok I can fix this for you but don't ever let this happen again". She was dead serious. I got upset at her about that comment. Long story short, she kept me on hold for 35 minutes then said she couldn't do it and they would call me when it's done. I called back in the next day, talked to someone else and within 10 minutes everything was fixed. What the hell!

RingCentral VOIP services offer great value but not a flawless experience.

Pros

Having shopped business telephony solutions for my own professional practice, I settled on RingCentral as offering the best value for my dollar. I didn't need the VOIP services specifically, but since getting a suite of services from RingCentral I have used them routinely. Focusing specifically on the VOIP service offered by RingCentral I will say that RingCentral offers all the hard- or soft-line system customization options you could want, and makes it easy to use their VOIP services in whatever way you may require, either in the office or mobile. Meanwhile, RingCentral offers ready and helpful support for its customers.

Cons

Like any VOIP solution, RingCentral's VOIP quality is going to depend largely on the quality of your internet connection, which may be dodgy if you're operating remotely. This isn't a knock against RingCentral specifically, but a general warning. You'll also find if you're responsible for administering a RingCentral account, including setting up VOIP services, that while the system is extraordinarily powerful in terms of being able to customize it to your specific needs, the interface to do so is, frankly, pretty horrible and obtuse. Fortunately, for most purposes you may be largely able to "set it and forget it". However, if for some reason there are settings you may need to rotate on a regular basis, going through the system portal can be a big hassle.

PBX in the Cloud - Big Look for Small Firms

Our customers continually remark that our presence and appearance is that of a much larger company - they are amazed that a small company can have such features as the automated attendant, directory listing, audio conferencing, faxing, etc that we have. The system is ideal for companies with employees on the road. Everything is accessible from a smart phone, soft phone or physical device. We have had no software bugs/issues since subscribing a year ago. We took advantage of the annual billing option both because we are committed to the product and to obtain the discount.

Pros

The subscriptions are very easy to manage - adding or deleting subscriptions is all done easily online.
The setup is quite straight forward but there are a number of advanced options for which users should look at the help files (which are quite helpful). Voice mail, and fax options for each users, as well as opening hours, also easy to set up.

What is nice is the ability to have calls routed to devices in parallel or sequence. The call-flip feature to transfer a call from one device to another, without stopping the call, works well.

Our firm uses call groups to route calls for specific topics to specific agents. The ability to ring one or multiple agents simultaneously (first to pick up takes the call) is really useful.

Cons

The audio conference and the video conferencing are separate applications. It would be ideal if the audio conferencing users could use a web browser to connect the same as the video conference app. I can see the pros and cons of two applications but it can be a bit confusing to subscribers and their customers.

RingCentral Rings Our Bell! For a Price.

Pros

The softphone app performs well and is easy to use. The softphone app can be installed on multiple computers allowing you to have, for example, one copy installed on your desktop and one copy installed on your laptop. This means that I can leave my desk and take my laptop with me and still be able to answer my phone.

The softphone integrates with Outlook, so I don't have to duplicate all my contacts into another piece of software. This saves so much time and makes life so much easier.

Cons

Missed calls are not registered on the soft phone in a timely manner. If I have a missed call, the soft phone may not show it for a few minutes or for a few hours.

Their is no app for Windows 10 mobile and no app for Windows 10 (besides the standard Windows OS application). Having a native UWP would be a great option for RingCentral

Soft phone installs are limited to two devices, so I can't install the soft phone on my work PC, work laptop, and home PC. Limiting the amount of soft phones that can connect to the service could be bumped up to 3 or 4.

The soft phone application is easy to use, but I think a revamp of the styling would make it even easier. I often click on different tabs because the icons are not always clear. One icon could mean two different things to two different people.

RingCentral Phone System

Pros

- Good call quality. Since it's VoIP, I was worried about call quality and dropped calls - but we've had RingCentral almost 2 years and I've never had an issue. It's all dependent on your internet connection, so if your internet is not great, then RingCentral probably isn't the best option for you.
- Once you get the hang of it, it's easy to manage accounts and set up new users.
- Great if you don't have a receptionist, or if most of your employees work remotely. You can have physical phones, as well as and app so that employees can use their cell phones.
- Much cheaper than most standard phone carriers.
- Fax option is great, you don't have to have a real fax machine - just a scanner.

Cons

- Implementation wasn't hard, but their administrative account is not the most user friendly. There are a ton of settings options, and if you don't use the phone system exactly how RingCentral assumes you will, it can take a while to configure your way and get around certain defaults.
- Customer service is about what you'd expect - only a call center with agents that are hard to understand. Luckily we only needed customer service during implementation, we haven't had any issues since.
- Employees will need to be trained, you can't just hand them the phone and account and tell them to run with it. One older employee had an extremely hard time with faxing - couldn't get over the fact that there wasn't a real fax machine.

Expensive but Useful

I use RingCentral in our business every day. I can easily determine who has called during the past 60 days, and how often. I can also evaluate how many calls I'm missing, and I have the capability to quickly reference all of those calls that need to be returned. This software is a bit pricy, but if they could incorporate a better data function for customers it would be more than worth the cost.

Pros

RingCentral provides a valuable resource for companies with high call volumes. I like the fact that you can have multiple users and each user can be set up with their own Voice Messaging. The ability to create multiple greetings depending on if there is someone there to take the call, the time of day, if you are open or closed, or gone on vacation. I'm certain that RingCentral is more than most small businesses will ever use, but enough to take care of nearly every telephone need.

Cons

There is no way to maintain a useful database for your customers. Although there is a Contact feature, it's very basic. This Software would be a home-run if it had a useful database feature. For example, when a call comes in, it would be able to pull up a customers record on-screen that could be edited while speaking to the customer. It would also be useful to be able to import a CVS file to capture existing customers.

Yes. It is awesome!

This is simply huge improvement over the old time he phones. They have a great reputation. We have not even begun to implement all the features such as the integration between RingCentral and Zapier and our CRM to automatically send over call logs or notes.

Pros

I can use this to call from anywhere. I don't need to use my desktop phone. If I met the house and I'm working from home, I have my CRM and RingCentral on my desktop and it is almost just as good as working at the office. As far as my clients know, it is just as good. I use this whether I travel or am at home and it is seamless.

Cons

I wish it had a stronger intercom feature for the soft phones. The soft phones are the desktop applications that work like a phone.

I also wish that they would offer text-only numbers which would be super helpful so long as they do it at a much lower rate than the regular numbers. I don't want to use my regular telephone number to send text to my clients and I don't want to use the main company number to do that either. They're very good reasons for this such as I don't want clients calling me back on my desktop number because I'll never get anything done if there calling me directly all the time. I don't want them receiving a text from me at the main company number (it does allow you to set it up as though you are calling from the company's main number or texting from the company's main number but that's a bad idea for us) and then sending a text back to the main company number and the front desk team was not in the loop for the initial conversation.

Ring Central Desktop soft phone

Ive used Ring Central for 8 years and most of that time its been perfect service. I have had some spotty quality of service issues, mostly related to my equipment and they have been great at troubleshooting whether it is their settings or my router settings that need to be updated.

Pros

The Ring Central desktop soft phone allows me to phone, fax, text, initiate voice conference calls or video meetings, and more functions I still haven't used. The platform is stable, it is easy to configure, it has excellent telephone support and it is has a very competitive price. I use a plantronics headset and have been using Ring Central for 8 years.

Cons

A couple of basic enhancements to better manage conference call access codes that have been requested on their website for the past 7 years have still not been implemented. Their product support team expects me to be able to spend an hour on the phone every time they call and try to cancel the ticket if I don't take their call immediately. But overall they have provided in depth network troubleshooting support when I have had occasional quality of service issues (robotic sounding calls).

Excellent cloud phone system for small business!

Seamless phone integration across multiple offices, a greatly reduced cost, and higher reliability and redundancy.

Pros

Ring Central is extremely easy to use and set up. Reliability is second to none and it has allowed me to seamlessly integrate our corporate phone system across three offices spread out around the country. The online and desktop experience is superb and well-liked by all employees. The app for smartphone makes it very easy to use your mobile device just like the desk phone and you can call all internal and external contacts on the go just as if you are at your desk. The cost is much lower than we were paying before and the best thing about Ring Central is that it involves no hardware (except for the phone) so no risk of server issues or need to ever pay anything for these. Their support is excellent and whatever very minor issues that have come up were quickly resolved via online chatting. Switching our corporate phone system to Ring Central has been one of the best things our company has ever done.

I have had a good experience with RingCentral, but make sure your system is powerful enough

Pros

The RingCentral Office suite has some great products which really integrate well with each other. I host daily meetings with the RingCentral Meetings app and quality is usually good. I also do a lot of cold calling from the soft phone and have the phone integrated with our Salesforce CRM, which makes logging calls very easy.

The RingCentral messaging app (Glip) is one of my favorite parts of the suite of products. Great for communicating with your team, sending files quickly, starting a quick video call, and just collaborating in general.

Cons

Although I love Glip, it keeps freezing on me and I have to uninstall it and reinstall it. Only to have it happen a few minutes later. Luckily, they have a web version of the app, which works great, but I do wish the desktop app would work.

We had a lot of issues with call/meeting quality with RingCentral when we first started, but soon realized it was the fault of the systems we were running the program on (4GB Microsoft Surface Tablets). We were experiencing bad call quality, echoes, and delays in calls. After switching to an 8GB Surface most if not all of those issues have been resolved.

Office Tool while working at home or anywhere

Pros

I am from the philippines and as a Virtual assistant we need to call businesses at the United States. Ring central provides your own work phone number both web based and desktop tool that you can install in your Pc or laptop. With this tool,calling our leads was easy providing us better results and more sales. The quality is good and connection is stable. They number that appears to them would be a US number. Aside from their great voip, they have ring central meetings which i use when i do a sales presentation to my clients. Connection is good and they can see ny screen clearly without compromising thevoice quality. Recording the presentation is also a great feature which we save for upcoming trainings of new agents. Great customer suppport and client service is commendable.

Cons

The cost is much higher compared to other voips. Some features have additional cost. You can not choose only the voip to pay lower. Glip and ring central meetings are included in the

Ring Central for Office - Best Business Telephone System Money Can Buy

Pros

Ideal business internet phone system on the market. Everything in one place - telephone, fax, text, zoom meetings, quick chat, you name it - Ring Central has it. The Ring Central App has benefited our business immensely. We can have sales associates on the road and still transfer calls from the office to them; the customer will not know whether they are in the office or on the road. Quick chat function (Glip) makes it easy to set up teams via chat (e.g. Sales Team) to push up daily targets, communicate fast and easily to a specific person, etc. People often respond to a message quicker than a phone call! The capabilities of Ring Central are endless. I would recommend anyone looking at a telephone system to check out Ring Central in detail.

Cons

Being an internet phone system, we have found the connectivity has been an issue. Some days the phone line will be extremely crackly, even though we have the best internet system available in our location.

Very Good Service

It helps me with my sales, I could not work without this software.

Pros

I like the ability to install in the Desktop App, Cellphone and even on my tablet. The fax feature is very simple, its just the number@rcfax.com, other service use very long fax email in order to send by email, you can print directly to fax, or fax from Desktop App. I can send Pictures from the Desktop App and from Mobile App, this is very useful for my work. They had a promotion for a fee Headset and they delivered. I have used the service for a couple of years already and experienced only one downtime for an hour or two, so very reliable. The cost is higher than most of the other providers. But, I guess its worth it.

Cons

I always get confused with the settings, it is not very easy to get the actual system going. I have experienced some glitches where the app does not open on the desktop, I have to call myself once, then the app stays open after that.