RingCentral had its Biggest Year in 2020

Matt Archer

January 19, 2021

RingCentral 2020 quote

Improvement and Modernization

Many businesses found ways to innovate and bring better value to their customers in the challenging year that was 2020, but one that really stands out is RingCentral.

This unified communications giant is the industry leader for the 6^th year in a row, leading Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant.[1] It continues to drive forward powerful new and updated features such as the RingCentral Video app, and an integration with Zoho’s CRM and application suite.

2021 is likely going to be a lot like 2020 in terms of the focus on remote work, so a unified communications platform is an even more critical tool for companies to provide their staff and client base a method to easily communicate with each other remotely, ranging from phone to video conferencing to text chat.

With that in mind, we’re going to explore some of the most important RingCentral innovations from 2020.

An Industry Leader

RingCentral 2020 an industry leader Firstly, there’s a reason why RingCentral has been tagged as the industry leader in unified communications by Gartner research for the 6^th year in a row. Many of those reasons will be covered in the sections below, but it bears mention that there are quite a few unified communications, web conferencing or phone apps on the market today. To be able to achieve this very respectable feat is noteworthy in itself.

If you are interested in more details, the Gartner report can be acquired here and is covers areas of UCaaS such as:

Strengths and cautions of every vendor
Critical considerations for any solution
How RingCentral and other vendors are evaluated

RingCentral Video

In April, 2020 RingCentral launched RingCentral Video, a new app that allows users to meet anywhere in HD video without needing to download anything. One of the biggest features about RingCentral Video is its ease of use. People often struggle to join meetings because they have to download an application, and if they’ve never done that before it can be frustrating.

RingCentral Video works directly from your browser, allowing for easier updates and access, but also added security because meetings joined through browser have quicker security enhancements that don’t require any updates to download for like many standard apps.

Speaking of security, RingCentral Video also uses the secure meeting platform WebRTC framework, which is very important to note because other video conferencing platforms have ran into noteworthy security issues over the past year that customers would want to avoid, such as uninvited meeting attendees, ability to hijack PCs running older operating systems, and potential data privacy issues[2]

RingCentral Video also offers additional features desired by users such as end-to-end encryption, waiting rooms, virtual backgrounds and more in the pipeline.

Glip

Another powerful tool RingCentral launched in 2020 was their chat app, Glip. This can also be accessed via your web browser and allows you to text chat with one or many individuals and groups, while also being able to make phone or voice calls/send text messages, and hold video meetings directly from inside the browser app. Below are some of the features of Glip, as described by RingCentral here.

RingCentral Glip Pro™ is a free, unlimited, easy-to-use solution that combines video meetings and audio conferencing with team messaging
Meetings can fit up to 100 participants with an incredible 24-hour time limit
Enjoy features such as emoji reactions, virtual backgrounds, closed captions, and more
Built upon RingCentral’s carrier-grade security and reliability

RingCentral Unified App

RingCentral 2020 unified app In addition to RingCentral Video and Glip, RingCentral also combined both the existing mobile and desktop applications into one unified app that makes it easier than ever to manage your communication. Some of the additional innovations to the app in 2020 include:

Adding Dark theme to app to ease eye strain
Implementing Emoji reactions in text chat
Updating the Message formatter
Incorporating the ability to switch from a phone call to a video meeting with one click via RingCentral Video

Security is Serious Business

RingCentral 2020 security As mentioned earlier, security has been top of mind for RingCentral for years, but never more so than 2020 when so many issues were exposed as so many more people utilized web conferencing and virtual meeting platforms than ever before.

RingCentral created a trust portal that allows administrators to access security and compliance reports to help them to meet compliance, data protection and regulation requirements. Additionally, in 2020 RingCentral was able to achieve three internationally recognized ISO certifications: ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018.

Integrations Galore

RingCentral had a big year in 2020 on the integrations front, where it was adopted into many platforms, including but not limited to:

Canvas
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Dynamics 2.0
Smarsh
Slack
Zoho

All of these integrations are powerful for those who use these applications, but the RingCentral integration into Zoho is particularly impactful because you can now schedule a Zoho CRM event with a RingCentral Video meeting attached to it without leaving the Zoho CRM site. This makes it that much easier for business to do everything from one place.

Other Noteworthy Updates

RingCentral 2020 other updates Below are some additional updates that RingCentral made last year that continue to demonstrate the passion for improvement this company has.

Acquisition of DeepAffects, “a leading conversational intelligence pioneer that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze business conversations and extract meaningful insights. The acquisition is part of RingCentral’s rapid innovation to create smarter video meetings.”[3]
Implementing a feature to detecting and prevent robocalls.
Group MMS so users can send multimedia messages to multiple people at the same time.
Advanced options for call queue routing such as automatic call redirection or overflow queue activation when the primary queue is busy.
Centralized license purchase and management in the RingCentral admin portal.
Businesses can now add logos and custom messages to RingCentral service notifications so users instantly recognize and trust them.[4]
Improved analytics for video meetings and adoption usage.

Final Thoughts

RingCentral is a very powerful unified communications platform that millions of people use worldwide. They have improved upon an already industry-leading platform and have plans to innovate ever further in 2021.

However, without expert help, RingCentral can be very complex and will fail if not implemented with appropriate business processes and training in place.

As a partner of RingCentral, Positive Results™ helps companies to implement and tie together all of these applications so they work together smoothly and accomplish exactly what your business requires and desires. We work with SMBs to understand their business process and implement what they need from the cloud space, whether it’s unified communications, CRM, document collaboration tools and more.