Takeaways from RingCentral’s 2019 Analyst Summit

I spent the earlier part of this week attending RingCentral’s Analyst summit — an annual event that provides analysts like myself an opportunity to interact with the company executives to discuss RingCentral’s overall CX strategy, thoughts on customer and employee engagement, recent acquisitions, customer wins, product roadmap and market vision.

From a high-level perspective, Vlad Shmunis, the company CEO and all the other executives speaking at the event noted that they see RingCentral at the intersection of customer and employee engagement — a very popular topic across enterprises today. Many businesses continue to consider customer experience as a byproduct of technology or the processes. In reality, it’s the employees in the business that determine which technologies to use, and what processes to build and manage to address customer expectations. As such, the experience of the customer is directly tied to employee activities.

Empowering Employees with the Power to Communicate & Collaborate

For employees to maximize CX program results, they must be empowered to do their jobs efficiently. This point, Aberdeen recently surveyed 369 customer experience management (CX) executives around the world to determine the key trends and best practices influencing their CX programs. The findings reveal that, on average, employees spend 17% of their time looking for knowledge (e.g., customer data, customer billing statements, knowledgebase articles, parts information) to do their jobs. That’s time employees could have spent on more productive tasks such as resolving customer issues, receiving coaching and training, etc. For companies to achieve their CX goals (i.e., increasing customer satisfaction, growing brand awareness and driving increased client spend) they must first empower employees with easy access to the right knowledge.

The event featured two customer panel sessions; one on enterprise communications and another on contact center. Both sessions were thought provoking — delving into how companies such as Extra Space Storage, Turo, Goosehead Insurance and Belkin use various UC and contact center capabilities to accomplish their business objectives. A significant takeaway from these sessions is that the IT leaders across these firms all clearly understand the role they play in influencing CX results. Berry Hench of ATB Financial and Lance Rolls of Belkin both noted that as IT leaders, they see themselves responsible for enabling employees with the tools they need to create happy customers. They noted that CIOs that don’t understand or don’t focus on customer experience risk their company performance lagging behind their peers that do.

Jim Dvorkin, SVP of RingCentral’s Customer Engagement product shared updates on the evolution of the company’s contact center capabilities and market messaging. He noted that the Dimelo acquisition from October 2018 brought AI-enabled digital engagement capabilities, and that intent-based routing across digital channels is one of the ways they currently support contact centers with AI. Specifically, that intent is determined through an algorithm that analyzes contextual data by observing previous interactions — if the customer used self-service within the past half hour, customer’s chat transcript from a live chat session, etc. — to determine the context and optimize routing.

During follow-up discussions, David Lee, VP of Platform Products, noted that the contact center AI capabilities also enable firms through optimizing self-service and chat bot interactions with insights gleaned through machine learning, as well as provide agents with guidance such as knowledgebase articles to resolve customer issues. These three (routing, self-service and agent guidance) are the primary use cases of AI across most contact center platforms today, and RingCentral’s approach seems to align with its industry peers in this area.

Collaborative contact center is a key part of the company’s messaging for its contact center product. This isn’t surprising, as it emphasizes integrating the company’s communication and collaboration capabilities (e.g., presence, company directory, video and instant messaging) within it’s contact center platform to help agents more easily find subject matter experts (SMEs) and collaborate with peers across the business to resolve customer issues.

Don’t Forget the Fundamentals

While it’s not a catchy topic as AI, voice quality was also an important discussion topic at the event. The customer panel featured several organizations noting they switched from their previous communication provider due to poor voice quality hindering business operations and negatively affecting customer experiences. This was a good reminder that while IT and contact center leaders must keep their eye on emerging technologies, such as AI, that can help them do their jobs better, they must not forget the importance of key building blocks to ensure business continuity and overall success.

It was important that the discussions at the event, including the customer panels, noted that the combination of enterprise communications and contact center capabilities shouldn’t just focus on cost reduction. While reducing cost is a key objective for most businesses, the customer panel discussions also highlighted how the customer experience improvements enabled through better communications help firms establish customer loyalty and drive revenue growth. Hence, it’s an important reminder that firms looking to optimize their communications and contact center programs shouldn’t just focus on driving efficiency and reducing cost, they must also measure their success in driving revenue to find ways to enhance their financial health.

What are your thoughts on the intersection of employee engagement and customer engagement? Does your business currently have a program through which you focus empowering employees with the knowledge and tools to achieve your CX goals? If so, please share how that influenced your business results.