No Jitter Roll: RingCentral’s Teams Integration, CCaaS Update

This week, RingCentral partners with Microsoft on a Teams voice integration, while Verint updates its platform with real-time agent capabilities. Dialpad and Zoho partner on a CRM integration, Voss goes GA with a UC automation platform update, plus AT&T and Cisco reveal a new secure access service edge (SASE) service.

 

Enterprise cloud communications provider RingCentral is teaming up with Microsoft to provide Teams customers phone capabilities. In the coming months, organizations will be able to integrate RingCentral’s cloud PBX functionality, including embed calling, call-to-web, fax, SMS (U.S. only), and voicemail controls, into the Teams environment.

 

RingCentral provides two options to bring RingCentral calling into Teams: an embedded dialer integration between the RingCentral app and Microsoft Teams or by Microsoft’s Teams BYOC option, Direct Routing. With call handling settings, customers can also choose how they want to make calls in Microsoft Teams — either by using the RingCentral desktop or web app to complete their calls with the embedded RingCentral dialer.

 

Customer engagement provider Verint has added agent assist capabilities, including real-time sentiment analysis and full interaction context, to its Customer Engagement Cloud Platform. With the AI-based functionality, bots can provide agents with interaction context aimed at improving agent efficiency and reducing handle times. Additionally, a new engine will add customer intent and sentiment analysis to post-call transcriptions.

 

With the partnership, Dialpad will integrate its UCaaS platform into the Zoho CRM, which aims to improve call center agent operations by reducing the need to switch between applications. The Dialpad-Zoho integration also aims to improve agent focus by automating call logging within the corresponding Zoho CRM customer record, and to use Dialpad Voice Intelligence to pull up historical customer data during customers interactions.

 

VOSS-4-UC V21 is the latest version of the UC automation platform, and it features several new features, including a refreshed administration portal, an improved view of the inventory within the new admin portal, an updated number audit tool, and extended support for Microsoft Teams. To this last point, Voss customers can now manage their Microsoft tenants by simply overbuilding the existing user and service data into VOSS-4-UC and automate workflows around onboarding and ticketing systems. VOSS-4 UC 21 also has expanded its Webex Teams management with support for configuring calling and calling behavior settings for users in Control Hub.

 

The new SASE offering provides highly secure, direct connections to the web and SaaS applications for the hybrid workforce, with software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technology and security capabilities. AT&T SASE with Cisco is aimed at customers who are prioritizing migration to cloud-based applications and services. Said Shailaja Shankar, senior VP and GM, Cisco Security Business Group, “The shift to remote work has accelerated the need for SASE solutions, so that users and devices are secure anywhere they work."