RingCentral Office – Review 2021

We’ve tested RingCentral Office several times as part of our business Voice-over-IP (VoIP) solutions roundup, and it’s always fared well, earning an Editors’ Choice designation for the last five years. This time is no different, except that the company has added several new features to this already well-rounded Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) contender. These include artificial intelligence (AI) features, new collaboration capabilities, a new administration portal, an updated mobile experience, and a long list of available app integrations so you can customize the platform to best fit your needs. All this and a reasonable price once again make RingCentral Office our top VoIP pick for larger businesses. Intermedia Unite is our winner for smaller companies.

RingCentral Pricing and Plans

Unlike many of its competitors, RingCentral’s pricing has not changed since our last review and comes in four levels. The lowest tier is called Essentials and accommodates up to 20 users for $19.99 per user per month. The Standard level, at $24.99 per user per month, expands to unlimited users and adds popular integrations as part of the package, including Google Workplace, Microsoft 365, and Slack.

At $34.99 per user per month, the Premium level provides additional call handling features, automatic reporting, and a larger selection of app integrations. It also has several more advanced features that’ll be important to enterprise customers, such as a multi-level auto-attendant, inbound caller ID, call recording, and some identity management capabilities, notably: Single Sign-On (SSO) and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or Google directory integration. Finally, there’s the Ultimate tier, which costs $49.99 per user per month and includes everything in the Premium tier as well as better device management and unlimited storage for recorded video calls and web meetings.

For small to midsize businesses (SMBs), the Standard tier provides everything these companies will need from a hosted Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system and the app integrations mean it should be easy to snap into most customers’ productivity environments. But given the distributed nature of today’s workforce, the identity and directory integration features offered by the Premium tier will likely make it attractive to SMBs, too.

While its price is still slightly higher than some of the competition, RingCentral Office has become more competitive over the past couple of years as new features have been added without the core pricing going up. That’s especially true of its Glip online collaboration software, which is available as part of the RingCentral Office package because it’s also the primary platform RingCentral is marketing for video conferencing, a service that’s become much more important during the pandemic.

In fact, RingCentral released an updated version of Glip back in mid-December, 2020. The new version improves upon the original with better team messaging features and updated collaborative web meeting features. RingCentral Office customers have automatic access to Glip’s free tier, but there’s also a paid version, costing $11.99 per user per month. This adds features like call out capability and cloud-based recording, plus more advanced calling and user management tools. Glip doesn’t have quite as many app integrations available as RingCentral Office, but then it’s a primarily a standalone team messaging and meeting app, so integrating with RingCentral’s VoIP platform is really job one.

Aside from those capabilities, an important detail that helps make RingCentral attractive to larger organizations is that it’s got a strong set of administration tools as well as service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure your phone services are reliable. If you’ve decided to purchase the product, then check out our Quick Start: 7 Easy Steps to Configure RingCentral for Your Business guide, which breaks up the setup process into seven short, handy instructional videos.  

RingCentral Connectivity

RingCentral Office is a hosted Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) provider, which means if you’re looking to have handsets on your employees’ desks, you’ll need SIP phones on-premises to use the service. Alternatively, you can use the RingCentral softphone, which comes in both Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows flavors. This has become an especially popular option with so many people working from home who are unable to take their office SIP phone with them.

The softphone has all the capabilities of a handset, integrates with RingCentral’s mobile apps, and can be used interchangeably with a SIP phone should your users have access to both. That’s as capable a software solution as we’ve seen even from offerings that focus primarily on their softphone, such as Dialpad.

If you’ve got to have a handset, RingCentral supports a wide range of desktop VoIP phones from vendors such as Cisco, Polycom, and Yealink. You’ve also got the option to use a generic SIP device, though some functions may not work properly on these platforms, so if possible, it’s a good idea to get RingCentral to pre-configure your phones for you.

All of our VoIP competitors need a robust internet connection to work properly, which means you’ll need a wide and reliable pipe at your office location. Network hiccups, like too little bandwidth or network jitter, mean garbled conversations, video artifacts, and even dropped calls. You can work with RingCentral’s professional services arm to help optimize your main office network, though this will cost extra. You’re on your own, however, for all those home networks that will now be using the RingCentral Office softphone client. Then again, that’s true of all our VoIP contenders, though it’s something you should think about when you’re deploying any VoIP service for the next couple of years.

To help optimize your main office network, RingCentral measures MOS (mean opinion scores) when network connections are set up to ascertain call quality. Alternatively, RingCentral can offer dedicated circuits to its data center facility. Naturally, this will cost more than a standard internet circuit, but if you want crystal clear calls guaranteed, it may be your only option should your network simply not have enough bandwidth or stability.

Something that sets RingCentral Office apart from some competitors, like 8×8 X Series, is that it can integrate with some existing PBX systems or local phone services. It does this via an on-premises Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) that connects to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through local analog lines. Another feature that can help any business customer is that RingCentral has a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier). That means it can do things like turn off spam calls. RingCentral says it has CLEC service available in every major market.  

Client Configuration and Functionality

As stated above, you can get the RingCentral desktop client for either Apple or Microsoft PCs. We tested the Windows client, which provided us a clean interface with access to all the tools in RingCentral’s Standard tier (our test tier). This includes basic telephony features plus a nice selection of collaboration tools even without the Glip client. These include event management, file sharing, note taking, and task tracking.

If you can’t access your desktop client, you can opt for either a dedicated mobile app (available for either Apple iOS or Google Android) or a web client that has the same basic experience as the desktop client. We found the mobile client has been updated this time around with a cleaner interface that has near-feature parity with the desktop software. You can switch your call between the desktop client and a mobile device mid-conversation with no disconnect and as long as you’ve got video conferencing capability you can turn that on and off without hanging up as well.

RingCentral’s integration with both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 is bi-directional, meaning you can add or edit contacts in RingCentral’s desktop or mobile app and those changes will sync with either platform. All calendar events will be synced between RingCentral Office and your email or scheduling app, and it’s even possible to sync your tasks with a task management tool, like Todoist. RingCentral uses Zapier under the covers for many of its integrations, including Todoist. Zapier offers a free tier, which includes 100 tasks per month for the Todoist integration, but you’ll need a Zapier subscription for anything beyond that.

Yet More Features

RingCentral’s video conferencing now has closed captioning based on the company’s voice transcription technology. This can be invaluable if you’re listening to a meeting in a noisy environment or for the hearing impaired. No other VoIP product we tested offers this type of capability. Another feature we liked that’s also built into the desktop app is that you can share your screen while in a one-on-one, ad hoc group, or team conversation.

Glip has seen many improvements, too, though you should check out our dedicated review for a complete picture. Some of the highlights, however, include features that let you generate and assign tasks while conducting a meeting. RingCentral is also gaining on video conferencing market leaders, Cisco WebEx and Zoom Meetings, in terms of basic and advanced meeting features. For example, Glip now has a virtual waiting room to allow a host to control when participants can enter the conference. A weak point we didn’t like was that Glip still doesn’t give meeting participants the the ability to virtually raise their hand. However, a company rep told us this capability will be delivered soon.

Finally, there’s customization. If RingCentral’s internal list of app integrations isn’t enough for you or you’ve got a custom app that you need to connect to the system, there’s a developer portal that provides all the information you need to build your own custom integration. This offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to all the major capabilities of the system with sample code in the most popular programming languages. There’s even a tool that lets you try out a specific API without writing any code.

RingCentral System Administration

In terms of depth, RingCentral Office really shines from an administrator’s perspective. We found that the admin portal homepage has been revamped since our last test experience with a more intuitive layout that makes it easier and faster to access frequently used features.

Configuring nearly every aspect of RingCentral’s back-end services is done via procedural wizards. However, while that certainly makes configuration easier for VoIP newcomers, it might get tedious for more experienced administrators or those working with a significant number of user entries, though that’s a minor ding.

You can add multiple users in the same area through the wizard, but they’ll all get numbers in the same city and receive the same phone model. Since RingCentral is based around one line per user, if you’re in a situation where you need many phones or extensions but only a few actual usable lines to connect with the PSTN, then you’ll need to pay for a DID for every extension. That may get expensive, but you can also just assign extensions without an external number, and allow callers to enter the extension through the company directory or through an operator.

Once you’ve created a user, you can assign them to various groups. These can include things like call queues to handle inbound sales or support calls, shared lines that might be a group of phones scattered throughout a warehouse, or voicemail-only extensions that you’d use if you needed to direct callers to a voice mailbox.

The auto-attendant functions can step callers through several layers of customizable menus so you can route them to the correct extension or group. You’ll also get a dial-by-name directory and automatic or triggered call recording. RingCentral Office offers a Visual IVR editor, which is a graphical user interface (GUI) tool that makes it much easier to built your IVR tree. This displays a visual representation of the call routing and menu options, and makes it easy to understand how your routing works.

Common reports like the call log are now prominently displayed on the menu along with the most common administration functions. RingCentral’s reporting is similar to most of the other products we tested, including its analytics capability. You can export report data to a CSV file for further analysis and schedule reports for automatic delivery to one or more email addresses. A weak point is that while you can modify specific columns in the pre-defined reports, RingCentral still doesn’t have the ability to create a report from scratch. That’s not something we expect from an enterprise-level platform.

Making Use of AI

Over the last couple of years, RingCentral has integrated AI into several features, especially analytics. In December of 2020, the company acquired DeepAffects, which is a platform that can analyze conversations, including both audio and video calls, so customers can get insight into participants’ speech patterns and emotional sentiment. It can also detect accents and even recognize meeting participants through their voiceprints. The company couldn’t provide an exact timeline for when the DeepAffects feature set would be integrated with RingCentral Office nor which tiers would benefit, but sometime in the next 12 months is a fairly safe bet.

The DeepAffects features will further enhance the other AI-based features RingCentral has added over the last few years. These include capabilities like real-time transcription and machine learning features that can help sales people stick to a specific script.

Everything You Need From a Cloud PBX

RingCentral Office has the most robust feature set of any platform we’ve tested. Well featured, well-priced tiers can handle the needs of small, midsize, and larger organizations on up to enterprise businesses. The pricing structure is slightly high, but for what you get, it’s more than reasonable.

While reporting and collaboration still need some minor tweaks, RingCentral Office’s additional capabilities make up for it. The platform’s application integrations are also mature and will let you plug your phone into most major customer relationship management (CRM), business productivity, and help desk solutions. And if you can’t find a pre-built integration, RingCentral makes sure you can roll your own with a broad selection of APIs and excellent developer support.