Phone Is RingCentral but Nobody Is Home
RingCentral’s VoIP approach to collaboration is an interesting alternative to the data-centric approach typifying competitors, but its teleconferencing service falls far short of expectation and does little to spur collaboration.
We are assessing leading collaboration tools against four criteria that we consider critical to the future of this space. The criteria we used to assess RingCentral’s effectiveness as an enterprise tool are:
- Debates lead to elegant solutions.
- Project partitioning and allocation is efficient.
- Progress monitoring improves capital allocation.
- Risk mitigation improves project outcomes.
Source: RingCentral Collaborative Contact Center on SoftwareReviews, January 2019
RingCentral fails in all four criteria. Offering people who are not in physical proximity to one another a means to interact collegially is an important step in the right direction, but it’s only one of many toward achieving positive outcomes. Productivity requires supporting features that frame and guide cooperative processes.
Our Take
A collaborative approach founded on VoIP technology can be productive, but it must start with a superlative voice service. Meeting participants should be able to use the RingCentral platform to interact from anywhere in the world, be it Yemen, Mali, or Myanmar. The fact that this teleconferencing service only supports portions of the Americas and Eurasia makes moot its purported competitive advantage and renders this suite redundant.