An introduction to RingCentral Professional Services | #customersupport #supporticket

Everyone’s moving their communications to the cloud…but what’s the best, most cost-effective (and secure) way to move your business?

Working with a trusted cloud communications provider like RingCentral is a great start. Our expertise and professionals can take the guesswork and hassle out of cloud migration.

In this article, we’ll answer some FAQ’s about RingCentral Professional Services. That way, you can see for yourself if we can help your team get up and running on the cloud.

Let’s get started:

What is RingCentral Professional Services?

Simply put, RingCentral Professional Services is an add-on set of services for RingCentral MVP, RingCentral Rooms and RingCentral Contact Center customers. Professional Services helps guide our customers through consultation, implementation, adoption and ongoing support points of the RingCentral customer lifecycle. By assisting our customers in choosing and deploying RingCentral, and thus achieving business outcomes more quickly.

We understand the ins and outs of business communications, and believe that by opting for complete RingCentral technology adoption & usage, you get the right communications tools to help you achieve your business goals and provide the best customer experiences possible. We have the migration expertise and resources to assist you in using the functionalities of call routing and IVR systems, eFaxing, real-time SMS, team messaging, video conferencing, phone calls, CRM integrations, and various cloud-based contact center solutions.

What are the benefits of using Professional Services?

RingCentral Professional Services is designed to make cloud services simpler to deploy, use and manage. Our decades’ worth of cloud telephony and contact center experience can be used to your advantage, and when you do, here’s what to expect:

• Faster deployments and ROI realization – Get installed and use your software faster. Accelerate your ROI and investment, make business leaders happy. We remove complexity and headache of migration for our customers. Our expert consultants seamlessly port your phone numbers, deploy communications solutions, migrate legacy on-premise PBX systems, ensure rapid cloud phone system implementation, and set up a mirage of business apps integrations that keep processes running smoothly.  For contact center deployments we can assist with agent administration, creating your Contact Center IVR, configuring WEM and ACD, call flow scripting, API development, telephony implementation, IT Infrastructure/Network Setup, as well as deliver training for agents, admin and managers.
• Peace of mind – As the leader in cloud telephony and contact center, RingCentral is the most experienced integrated UCaaS & CCaaS provider in cloud communications deployments. RingCentral professional service experts deeply understand the complexities of both the UCaaS and CCaaS products. This understanding allows us to steer each customer to realizing the highest value from these tools.
• Improved productivity and efficiency – We help companies find new ways to increase productivity and efficiency with these tools. We work with you every step of the journey—from planning, implementation, and deployment to management, training, and customer support. You will realize the benefits of UCaaS and we can support hybrid PBX deployments, application customization, integrations and more.
• Personalized assistance – To ensure you receive the most suitable communication and team collaboration tools, we take the initiative to offer high touch services including end to end project management with a playbook to optimize your new communications system’s configurations and performance.
• Better admin and  user experiences – You can opt for personalized in-person onboarding and and user training, but you will also get access to on-demand user and IT admin level training and knowledge transfer. This includes helping you as an IT admin learn how to create customized user profiles and setting up your custom business phone systems ring, how voicemail-to-email works, how call queues are handled, how phone numbers are managed, and more. We can help you set up caller IDs, auto-receptionist, call routing, call forwarding, power dialing, and other phone service configurations.
• Managed service ongoing enterprise support – Your customer’s expectations are higher than ever, making RingCentral one of the most important investments in your tech stack. Let us provide you with the VIP support experience including full outsourcing of day-to-day management of your UCaaS and CCaaS applications. This  will help you reduce OPEX, increase coverage, ensure response time guarantees, have tailored proactive monitoring, and enjoy 24/7 support.

What are “managed services and enterprise support”?

RingCentral managed and enterprise support services are ideal for large businesses that have multi-locations, custom integration needs, remote workforce, no dedicated IT resources for UCaaS or CCaaS tools, or advanced integrations. Managed services in particular are popular with organizations going through change management, rapid growth, globalization, M&As or large complex operations and tech stacks.

Managed services is a full stack offering to reduce OPEX by fully outsourcing day-to-day management of their UCaaS/CCaaS applications. It’s third party help desk support to keep your employees and customers serviced. Perfect for large enterprises, we act as your own global helpdesk, so your users get expert support no matter where they are. 

Enterprise support packages are a cost effective way to enjoy some of the benefits of managed services through a partnership between RingCentral and your business to ensure business continuity. 

What kind of businesses can benefit Professional Services?

Without Professional Services, IT admins must deploy software manually themselves, or depend on outsourced managed services. Admins distribute apps to target machines remotely. They deploy from a centralized web console with silent installation switches in place. Alternatively, IT empowers the end users to self-install software using a self service portal. In this scenario, admins publish a list of software on the Self Service Portal which can be accessed by the end user from the system tray. End users in the same network have the option to access this catalog of software and choose to install them without asking the administrator every time. 

Problems with this approach: Time and resource intensive, it is also difficult to be an expert in all types of software to know the ins and outs of deploying them all. The complexity and overwhelm of migrating to the cloud can turn some folks off of the migration all together.

Thus, RingCentral Professional Services is for customers across all sizes and geographies. We serve the customer across their lifecycle, from consultation to lifecycle support. Our offerings include basic remote implementations for the tech-savvy all the way up to onsite, full service deployments designed for customers deploying integrated UCaaS and CCaaS in a complex, global environment. 

All industries use our Professional Services and we have a custom price point for every size of business. We offer professional services for all our product lines including RingCentral MVP, Contact Center, Rooms and more!

What experts can I engage via RingCentral Professional Services?

You can engage our in-house IT experts directly for your implementation or lifecycle support needs, or alternatively we do have channel partners, strategic partners and Carriers you can rely on if you have a longstanding relationship with one of them. 

Is anything included for free for small business deployments?

Yes! For businesses who are deploying fewer than 20 licenses we offer express onboarding and implementation which is a self guided and self-initiated onboarding for your business. You will get basic instruction and configuration of new RingCentral MVP customers. You call the shots with ultimate flexibility to call us when you are ready to start basic admin training, online account setup, and push out end user training. Once you have successfully implemented RingCentral MVP, you can continue to call in for any training-related assistance to the same hotline, 30 days post ticket completion.

For businesses deploying between 20 and 100 licenses we offer enhanced onboarding and implementation – a comprehensive instruction and customized configuration for customers. By going through the RingCentral service implementation playbook and discovery questions about your business, a customized onboarding agenda will be created to be used in the actual training. Once you have successfully implemented RingCentral MVP, you can continue to call in for any training-related assistance to the same hotline, 45 days post ticket completion.

Best of all, both of these are free of charge when you purchase RingCentral MVP. 

Why are professional services so critical for contact center migrations?

A contact center implementation is highly complex compared to most other software deployments because: 

• Developing a contact center solution that delivers the custom workflows and desired customer experiences requires a high level of customization 
• Helping to navigate the world of AI within contact center requires extra training and expertise
• Advanced self-service options including chatbots, proactive engagement, and Conversational AI are critical to implement – but these need to be set up properly first
• Our professional services team can empower your agents with AI-driven coaching and guidance in real-time
• Setting up multiple channels/methods for customers to contact agents – voice, chat, email, SMS, social media messaging and monitoring is challenging to set up without expertise
• Our professional services team can integrate your contact center into your 3rd party platforms such as CRMs, ERPs, Databases, Web Services, etc.

From our experience, the biggest lift in a contact center deployment is setting up the customized workflows. We’ve run a survey with our own customers and RingCentral are 56% faster on setting up workflows.

What kind of ROI have businesses seen with RingCentral Professional Services?

According to our own customer survey, RingCentral customers have found time to implement to be 3 months, time to payback of 9 months, with 43% improvement in speed of workflow deployment and 42% faster integrations with RingCentral MVP. Overall our customers saw their telecom costs decrease by 23% and IT spend decrease by 16%. 

Migrate your communications with the #1 team of cloud telephony and contact center experts in the industry

Remove the guesswork from your decision-making process and allow RingCentral to take care of the planning, designing, and deployment of your cloud communications system.

We have the most experienced team of UCaaS and CCaaS experts in the industry. RingCentral will keep your business up and running – securely and reliably. RingCentral delivers a powerful platform for connected, intelligent experiences across customers and employees. Lastly, we partner with your business to design a migration and cloud strategy that is tailored for your users and customer engagement strategies.

What’s more, with RingCentral Professional Services, you pay only for what you need (a la carte model pricing). Whether you require the guidance of an implementation advisor or need full-service onsite deployments, we have you covered. 

Learn more about RingCentral Professional services

Originally published Jan 24, 2023