Very Cost Effecient Way to Provide Seamless Phone Service for Local and Remote Employees

I have had a positive experience with RingCentral. We use it for all remote employees and our local conference rooms. Once the IT team had the process down for adding groups and numbers everything has run smoothly.

Pros

RingCentral was very easy to setup for our local office as well as remote employees. We mainly went with RingCentral for this functionality. I could order and ship a phone to a remote employee or set up a phone number for remote employee without them needing a phone and all they would have to do is plug in the phone or log in to RingCentral to get going. Call routing and everything else was seamless to the remote employees.

Cons

There is a bit of a learning curve in configuring the different groups. The customer success team is there to help you get started over the phone and generally available to help whenever needed. It was a bit of a pain to get started, but this was in 2015. It was quite a few emails back and forth with an account rep to get the right plan and block of numbers.

Call, text, fax and conference from anywhere

The overall experience with RingCentral is very positive. The sales and implementation cycle was smooth. Users got used to RingCentral very quickly and were excited for a different system of communication. The future needs of our company will be met with RingCentral. Using RingCentral now, we are able to reduce number of contracts, home grown systems, other vendors' system and unsupported systems in favor of cloud-based telephony. I am, and my company is, pleased with RingCentral.

Pros

RingCentral is a unified communication system. All types of communications stay in a single software. It's great to give a business partner your office number that they could call, text or fax. Video conferencing is easy. RingCentral can be used from a web browser, desktop application, tablet app or a phone app. The unification of all these communication in one spot makes it easy for business partners and customers to work with us.

Cons

RingCentral's video conferencing software and company chat system has opportunities for improvement. Video conference quality is not at par with Zoom. Company chat system is great but not as smooth and elegant as Slack. Those are two areas for improvement.

Moderately easy-to-use Phone Software

Pros

We make frequent use of the RingCentral desktop softphone applet in office. The applet works pretty well! This applet is probably the sole reason I like RingCentral as much as I do. Its easy to navigate, dial phone numbers, set yourself away, and transferring is a breeze.

Cons

To name a few: -Round Robin is really the only scalable phone support option. You can sorta make multiple phones ring at the same time, but only in small groups. Essentially, you cannot set up a "ring everyone at the same time" style of phone. I suppose this isn't a big deal for some, but its definitely a downer for us. -The actual website. Navigating and dealing with phone settings and administration related tasks is not easy. Unless you read the knowledge center or know how to do it already, it takes a LOT of clicking around to familiarize yourself with where things are or what certain features are or even what those features may be called. -Not every option is available to change or toggle on the desktop softphone applet, meaning unless you know exactly what needs to be set up and how, it can take a while of clicking and navigating menus until you understand where options live and how to use them.

Good for inner-office messaging but not for task management

I pretty much already said everything in my previous comments. This was already being used when I started working for this company so I don't know how it's measured up to people's initial expectations. But it is useful for messaging coworkers and discussing projects and other work-related topics. We use RingCentral meetings a lot. Not only does the entire office use it for our daily morning meetings, but it's also used a lot by individual teams to discuss their projects. This is another feature that has been especially useful during COVID. We used to use it some when we were all working in the office, but it's been a great tool for communicating with coworkers now that we are all home and can't easily walk down the hall to someone's office. From what I understand, this software is owned by Zoom so it has a lot of similar features to that meetings platform. So people that are familiar with Zoom would probably have an easy time figuring out how to use RingCentral meetings. I really dislike the desk phones though - which we received as part of our RingCentral package. They are way too complicated to use so I almost always used my personal cell phone to make work-related calls. I actually find the RingCentral Phone app a lot more intuitive and easier to use than the desk phones.

Pros

I like that you can set up different groups/teams to discuss things with people that are relevant to the conversation. For example, each company department can have their own team or one can be set up for a specific project and you can choose to only add the people involved with that project. You can also have private chats with with one or more people, then turn that chat into a team of you determine that world be beneficial. I also like that you can tag people, decreasing the chance that they'll overlook the message, know it's something important they need to view/respond to, and will see the message more quickly (if they have tagged-notifications turned on in their account settings). It's also nice that it's likes to the office phone system. It allows you to take phone calls made to your office phone on your cell phone if you have the RingCentral phone app (RC Phone) installed. This has been especially useful during COVID. We've been working from home for almost a full year and most people didn't take their desk phones home with them. It's great to be able to receive work calls even though we haven't been in the office. It also integrates with meetings. Each person has their own, unique meeting URL to use if they are scheduling meetings on the calendar. But you can also start a meeting directly within a team and everyone on the team will get notified that they are being called into a meeting.

Cons

My company was trying to use this for the reasons I described above, but also as a task-management tool. Although there are some task-management features built into the software, it's definitely not what I would recommend for that purpose. Because the main purpose of this is for messaging colleagues, the layout is not great for keeping your tasks organized and helping you stay on top of all the various projects you have going on at once. When tasks are assigned to people, they quickly get lost among all the messages that are posted after the assigned-task notification. When we were using this as our only task-management tool, people would often forget about tasks, miss the deadlines, etc.

Convenient Calling Solution

Overall, we choose to use RingCentral to making completing and receiving phones calls from external partners easier for our employees. It effectively did exactly what we hoped. Made life easier and solidified an appropriate work life balance. No longer did employees need to give out their personal mobile phone numbers but they were able to use their RingCentral line that went to the very same device. The RingCentral app integrated nicely onto iPhones and made the experience quite hassle free.

Pros

RingCentral has a handful of pros that make the software great and very ideal for doing business. To begin, RingCentral has a mobile phone app that can easily be downloaded on Apple or Android that completely integrates with the calling system on the device. The software gives you a completely new phone line that we used as work lines but the calls come right through on your existing device. As incoming calls come in, your phone indicates that its a call to the RingCentral line which made deciding when to accept a call very convenient. The software includes all the regular features of a phone, such as voicemail. When voicemail messages were left, I would also receive a notification email to my work email that had the audio message included and could listen right on the computer if I wanted to. Furthermore, the best pro I experienced with RingCentral was the ability to complete International calling and texting, both incoming and outgoing. This was the driving factor in me adopting the software and it worked perfectly. I was able to receive international calls without always needing to arrange a scheduled conference call. This made business very convenient. Discovering that I could text internationally through the RingCentral app was a great bonus!

Cons

What I've liked least about RingCentral are more so areas of improvement rather than full blown cons. Most notably, while the mobile app does integrate well and gets the job done, it can often times lag and be a bit clunky. Overall, the app lacks a sense of intuitiveness that proved challenging. Discovering and completing texting through the app, especially internationally, was very much not straightforward or easy to complete and required digging and research on my end. RingCentral even updated their app, creating a new one entirely, but the old app is also still active and both remain on my phone and it's unclear as to which should be used as it appears that both are fully functioning. Ultimately, I suppose the mobile app is the greatest con that RingCentral faces.