Ring Central (the future phone)

Benefits from Ring Central for me are the recorded lines. I deal with a lot of chargebacks and unhappy customers at times. To deal with them I need to have facts of what they are telling me and none other than a recorded line will get me those facts of the conversations had earlier with other employees, to determine the outcome of the issue presented to me.

Pros

My favorite pro on Ring Central are all the lines are recorded and there is easy access to pull up those calls. You simply log into your account on ringcentral.com and all calls can be searched by day, time or phone number. You can save the recordings to your computer and send them where applicable. Another pro is the phone has bluetooth capability. I have hooked up my head set to Ring Centrals phone lines several times. You also can easily transfer calls, add a conference call (3-way calling) and put the phone on DND (Do Not Disturb) if busy. My current Ring Central phone has 4 incoming lines available to ring, although I usually only need 2 lines. My first and last name is also on my phone. You can also set up for your phone to have different ring tones for different people and keep a phone book available on the phone for easy access of calling the people you call the most.

Cons

I have found two cons for Ring Central: Since the phone runs off of internet, if the wifi signal goes down, so does the phone. Unfortunately you will need to wait until the wifi connects again for the phone line to become active again. I do believe there is way to hard wire the phone line as well where it is not connected to wifi. The second would be the recorded calls only go back as far as 3 months. Sometimes in business we need to go back a little further than 3 months.

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.