RingCentral has committed to exceeding its target for annual recurring revenue (ARR) in AI tools following a string of product releases earlier this week.
The cloud-based software company announced its third-quarter earnings report on Monday, revealing strong results across the board.
This has led to ongoing investments into current and future AI products and initiatives.
“We remain on track to exceed the $100MN in ARR from new products by the end of 2025,” said RingCentral CEO, Vladimir Shmunis, adding:
“Adoption of our new AI-led products is broad-based across various customer cohorts, from small businesses to large enterprises.
“Our GSP partners are also beginning to sell these new offerings, expanding our reach and accelerating adoption.”
This expansion has led the company to roll out multiple AI product releases this week, increasing its customer base by branching out into emerging AI trends. The launches are aimed at enhancing communication experiences for both customers and agents.
This has resulted from an R&D spend of $125MN into its new AI portfolio. The company is already seeing consistent profitable growth, in the hopes of exceeding the year-end ARR target.
RingWEM Adds AI Workforce Tools to Cloud Contact Center
On Monday, RingCentral released its latest AI product, RingWEM, an AI-powered workforce engagement management suite designed to enhance its native cloud contact center, RingCX.
The suite offers four capabilities to strengthen customer experience across agent performance, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiencies by using AI-powered insights:
AI Quality Management: Designed to give human agents the skills to improve their overall performance, the quality management tool will use personalized customer quality criteria to evaluate and provide extensive insight and feedback on customer calls.
The tool is used to analyze and observe full customer interactions and agent workflows, delivering focused guidance for reskilling.
Furthermore, the tool offers AI-based coaching recommendations to improve agent expertise, allowing enterprises to improve their workforce by viewing their agents’ performance analytics, common communication themes and advise them on next steps using the provided data-driven advice.
AI Workforce Management: Used to improve quality in customer service, planning for potential challenges, and overall efficiency, this tool combines precise data forecasting and resourceful scheduling to align staff with probable tasks to tackle targeted demand.
By using precise data forecasting, the AI workforce management tool can use algorithms to analyze past and current data trends and business drivers to predict the likelihood of contact quantities, allowing time for agents to tackle abnormal spikes before they occur.
With intelligent scheduling, the workforce tool can generate actionable schedules for agents to follow that include agent preferences, adjustable service level actions, and business requirements to keep agents on track with tasks.
These can be modified to fit irregular changes in working conditions to ensure that service levels stay the same to avoid customer friction.
Additionally, customer agent supervisors can run probable scenarios to analyze the effectiveness of staff models and company changes before they are implemented.
AI Interaction Analytics: This tool provides enterprises with high-level insights into customer satisfaction with interactions, compiling data taken from surveys and summaries from the interactions themselves to address negative customer experiences.
AI Interaction Analytics can dissect customer conversations through voice tone, language preferences, and patterns in speech to assess satisfaction.
The tool can use this and other conversations to further analyze key customer trends and issues as a whole, allowing businesses to proactively address these concerns before escalation.
Screen Recording: Similar to the AI Quality Management capability, this tool allows supervisors to evaluate customer-agent interactions by collectively linking calls and screen recordings for a wider range of information into quality of conversation and workflow efficiency.
These tools can be utilized to address underlying issues with agent performance and customer satisfaction and elevate operations in contact centers to deliver smarter service.
RingCentral Debuts Agentic Voice AI Suite
RingCentral has also released its agentic voice AI communications suite, encompassing three tools that enhance communication experiences across the lifespan of each customer interaction.
AI Receptionist (AIR): Before a conversation begins, this tool ensures that calls are not left unanswered.
Using the voice AI ability to interact with customers, this AI agent can comprehend a customer’s reason for calling, answer questions, hand off real-time interactions to agents with summarized caller context, and identify and log potential opportunities that may require a human agent to follow up. These can help to avoid customer friction and repeated information.
For scheduling interactions, AIR provides multi-calendar support across a company to integrate employee schedules and harmonize teams.
Sales opportunities are collected and stored for future use in Salesforce, HubSpot, or with AIR’s own database.
AIR can also be used on any SIP-based phone, allowing AI customer handling to be dealt with across the cloud, any premises, or hybrid setups.
Brian Tucker, Chief Digital Officer at Televero Health, is a customer of RingCentral’s AIR tool.
He said, “Using RingCentral’s AI Receptionist, the results are undeniable. We saw our monthly appointments increase 14 percent in the first four months, an increase in monthly revenue of over $200,000.
“That kind of growth and return on investment is exactly what we need.”
AI Virtual Assistant (AVA): During a conversation, AVA can provide an agent with real-time assistance across customer interactions by implementing four key capabilities:
- Real-Time Calls and Meeting Summaries: Identify the relevant information, questions, and actionable tasks during the span of a call or meeting, generating summaries and highlight reels to allow agents to keep track of the interaction’s objective during the call.
- AI Writer to Create and Translate Communications: This capability can draft, edit, and translate conversations in multiple languages, allowing for seamless and customer-focused messaging.
- Multi-Use Assistance Across Workflows: By adapting to a user’s communication method, via phone, text, or chat, this tool can provide intelligent prompts and relevant actions for each task.
- Product Adoption and Feature Discovery: AVA can advise discovery and management methods to improve RingCentral’s overall customer enterprise experience.
Kira Makagon, President & COO, RingCentral, explained the value of AVA in an enterprise workflow: “By putting trusted voice intelligence at employees’ fingertips, AVA makes work more productive and empowering,
“AVA is your personal virtual assistant that enables you to work smarter, faster, and more efficiently.”
AI Conversation Expert (ACE): After a conversation, ACE steps in to offer evaluated business insights from these interactions and adds it into one analytics and insights layer for a simplified outlook.
It provides real-time insight into current customer satisfaction, trends in revenue, and overall agent team performance, giving context to performance data to allow leaders to act quickly.
When requested, ACE can turn compound data into written summaries, recommend actions and examples of improvement, and be used an interactive interface to allow leaders to inquire related queries with instant results.
Zach Jecklin, Chief Information Officer at Echo Global Logistics, and customer of ACE, uses the tool for improving company knowledge on customer calls and data trends.
“AI Conversation Expert provides us with the detailed coaching for individual calls, and the dashboard connects the dots by rolling up all that data into a clear, concise view of the major trends impacting the entire business,” Jecklin said.
“We used to have call data. Now, we have business intelligence. It’s that simple.”
RingCentral Pairs New AI Tools with Solid Growth
RingCentral has launched the new AI tools in conjunction with the announcement of its strong third earnings quarter.
During its earnings call, the company reported a total revenue result of $639MN, seeing a growth of 5 percent from the previous year.
Subscription revenue also increased, rising by 6 percent to $616MN, with a 23 percent rise of $130MN in free cash flow, which it intends to increase during the rest of the year.
