RingCentral made three big announcements this week. An expansion of its RingSense conversational intelligence capability; a new CCaaS offering; and a new CEO. This post takes a look at its new CCaaS: RingCX.
RingCentral created RingCX to fill a gap in its portfolio. The UCaaS provider has telephony, meetings, messaging, and some CPaaS services. It also has a reseller arrangement with NICE that powers its RingCentral CCaaS solution. Despite this broad portfolio, there is a gap: A simple CCaaS.
RingCentral struck its partnership with NICE seven years ago, and a lot has changed. Although branded RingCentral, it’s no secret NICE was behind RingCentral CCaaS. It’s been a win-win relationship for both providers. RingCentral gets an industry-leading CCaaS solution, NICE gets an industry-leading UCaaS partner, and RingCentral customers benefit from some of the UC/CC integrations that RingCentral built.
It’s no understatement that NICE is a recognized leader. Its CXone CCaaS solution has repeatedly been ranked as a Leader by Forrester, Gartner, and others since the firms have published CCaaS market reports. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS 2023 came out just this week and recognized NICE as a leader for the ninth consecutive year.
The CCaaS sector of enterprise communications is currently benefiting from tremendous innovation. Offerings are expanding into analytics and workforce engagement and becoming automated through AI. The leaders are redefining the space, and the products are becoming more powerful and complex. However, the analyst firms mentioned above as recognizing this leadership cater primarily to enterprise buyers, not necessarily small and medium-sized companies that often have simpler needs.
And that’s the gap. RingCentral meets the UCaaS needs of small and medium businesses but has only been able to offer one of the biggest enterprise focused CCaaS solutions (i.e., NICE). That’s not ideal for these smaller accounts, which tend to favor single-provider solutions for UCaaS and CCaaS.
Enter RingCX, a CCaaS solution optimized for easy deployments. It is integrated to RingCentral’s UCaaS MPV suite (message, phone, video) and, since RingCentral created the solution internally, it’s also integrated with other RingCentral services such as SMS, unified messaging, and fax.
RingCX is under limited availability today, with general availability in Q4 2023 and some modules slated for early 2024. RingCX is priced at under $100 per agent per month.
The 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS published this week states that “The CCaaS market continues to grow at double-digit rates.” One of the drivers of this growth cited in the report is “to reduce the number of vendor relationships.” There are probably more CCaaS solutions today than there will be in a few years, but new entrants still have opportunities to establish themselves. RingCentral has the benefit of being able to offer two solutions: neither has to be all things to all people. RingCentral CCaaS (powered by NICE) provides a high-end solution allowing RingCX to claim simplicity and value.
A single provider for both UCaaS and CCaaS offers a consistent user experience for meetings and messaging. This became particularly important during the pandemic. We sent agents to work from home, but they were lacking the basic communications tools that other employees had. Most UCaaS providers today—including the likes of 8x8, Cisco, and Zoom—offer a CCaaS solution as well.
RingCentral reported this week that its CCaaS business has grown to more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue. Its new RingCX solution is intended to expand its reach with a CCaaS aimed at addressing simpler use cases. This simpler product should be easier to use, quicker to deploy, and cheaper to purchase.
Will the introduction of RingCX upset the relationship between NICE and RingCentral? I hope not. So far, both companies have communicated a desire to keep things as they are. The solutions are very different in terms of features and complexity.
Dave Michels is a contributing editor and analyst at TalkingPointz.
