RingCentral Office

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Business communications are well on the way to a revolution, moving from their own private branch exchange (PBX) telephony switching systems to hosted voice over IP (VoIP) services like those offered by RingCentral, which take advantage of today's broadband Internet connections. RingCentral offers IP PBX as a service, so administrators just need to register for an account and configure the features they want right on the Web portal. The system just pushes the settings straight to the phone over the Internet. RingCentral (starting at $27.99 per user per month) brings SMBs both ease of use and a deep set of capabilities with its hosted IP PBX services. With calling features typically found in expensive enterprise PBX systems, more integrations, and lower pricing since our last review, RingCentral remains PCMag's Editors' Choice for SMB VoIP services.

Pricing
RingCentral Office offers various pricing levels—Standard, Premium, and Enterprise—and the per-user cost varies depending on the number of users. For businesses with 2 to 19 users, RingCentral Standard costs $27.99 per month per user with 1,000 minutes of call time, but the per-user price goes down to $22.99 per month for businesses with more than 100 users.

The Enterprise plan offers unlimited call time, automatic call recording, a multi-level auto-attendant, and Integration with Salesforce, Zendesk, and Desk.com; it ranges from $42.99 to $52.99 per month. And there's no setup fee. By comparison, Vonage charges $14.99 per user per month for a virtual extension, and $39.99 for an unlimited calling line, and though there's a nominal $100 setup fee, it's usually waived. Jive Hosted VoIP plans range from $21.95 to $29.95 per user per month, based on volume.

Getting Started Is a Snap
Registration for RingCentral is quick, and we received a phone number by email. Businesses can transfer an existing phone number, request a toll-free number, or even get a vanity number. With the phone number in hand, we logged into the Web portal and created extensions, assigned call groups (which we'll explain later in the review), defined call queues, set up a call attendant (automated messages customers hear when they first call), and did a whole lot of other things long before we even set up any of the phones. Then we created rules for call forwarding, voice mail storage, call routing, and call blocking.

The interface is slick and fairly responsive, but it can be a little confusing for first-time administrators. Sometimes we had to click on an option to open the submenu, and other times there was a Next button. Sometimes the Next button took us to the next sub-menu in the sequence, and other times it took us back to the top of the menu tree. Using Next or Back buttons a bit more consistently would make it much easier to step through the interface. To be fair, by the time we were configuring the fourth user, we got the hang of the way the interface worked, and found the process easier.

RingCentral helps small and midsize businesses navigate the maze of features and options within the interface through Web tutorials and videos that are thorough and useful. In fact, we heartily recommend taking a few minutes to go through them before starting out.

RingCentral's infrastructure supports an impressive list of IP phones—or you can just buy the preconfigured phones directly from the company. Businesses thinking of switching from an on-premises VoIP system to RingCentral may want to use the phones they already have. While that is an option, we think it's worth buying the preconfigured phones.

These phones are all set up, so all we had to do was plug them into the network and power them on. RingCentral sent a Polycom VVX 410 ($219) for the review, with a color screen but not a touch screen like the VVX-500 ($299). We plugged the phones into our network switch and powered them up. These are standard business phones, so we didn't have to worry about learning how to use the devices. The phones pinged RingCentral's servers, identified themselves, joined our phone network, and obtained all the calling rules we had already defined in the portal. it was as easy as that, and it was done in under 15 minutes (which included the time it took the phones to boot up and reboot).

Every time we changed the settings or portal options, the changes were pushed to the phones. Some routers, such as those in the Linksys WRT series, take a bit more effort to enable port triggering. An Internet connection of at least 90Kbps is recommended—not hard to find these days.

A Veritable Feast of Features
There are other cloud-based VoIP systems out there, and they have similar setup processes. What sets RingCentral apart from all the competition, however, is the smorgasbord of features the company has crammed into the service. Call auto-attendant (virtual receptionist), hold music, message alerts, presence information (in office, away, do not disturb), company directory, and directory trees are more-or-less standard in most modern PBX offerings, whether they are Web-based or on-premises. But RingCentral also offers call forwarding to mobile devices; call groups, where a group of phones all ring at the same time; call escalation, where if a user doesn't answer, the system calls the next person on the list and goes up the chain of command; and call queues, where callers wait for "the next available representative" to be available.

Along with a full-blown fax service, the system offers conference call bridge numbers. Users have a unique participant code to use for the conference call bridge number. They offer numbers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. We had no trouble getting a local area code for this review. Up to 1000 users can partcipate, compared with 25 for Skype and 10 for Jive.

The call-forwarding feature to mobile devices works in one of two ways. We set up the call rules to try the desk phone first, and if we didn't pick up, to call the mobile phone. If we didn't pick up the mobile within a certain number of rings, the system knew to redirect the caller back to the RingCentral voicemail to leave a message.

Alternatively, we could have decided not to bother assigning a desk phone. When creating a user, you can just point the extension to any phone number (mobile or landline), and that number will ring whenever someone called that extension. This is particularly handy in businesses where the employees are highly mobile, such as a real estate agency. The employees get all their calls on a regular phone, but they stay within the same RingCentral world as the rest of the company.

RingCentral's SMS messaging capability means employees don't need to use their personal mobile phones to send text messages, and businesses can send out notification text messages to customers when necessary. Jive lacks this sort of text messaging capabilty, while Skype does let users send SMS messages. The Click To Call Me button makes it possible for customers to reach a business directly from its website.

Automatic call recording can be set up to record calls based on specific criteria. Calls with the support team may automatically be recorded, but not those of the CEO, for example. RingCentral also offers a feature it calls a Virtual Calling Card, which allows users to dial the company number, log in, and then make an outgoing call. This means employees don't need to worry about carrying around a calling card or remembering PINs for phone calls.

All voicemails, call recordings, and call logs are stored on the portal. If the business sets up automated call recording (for quality purposes), each of the call recordings are time-stamped and stored online. It's really easy to listen and play back a call. All these features combine to make an SMB sound like a polished, professional organization, which is great for a small company trying to look big. It can also make multiple locations sound like one and the same.

Management
The RingCentral portal is really straightforward, and more modern than Jive Hosted VoIP's portal. You turn on a feature, and assign which extensions, departments, and users have access to it. Having this on the Web means administrators can access the system from anywhere. RingCentral has made this even more convenient by releasing Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone apps that also allow administrators to manage users directly. Users can also manage RingCentral voicemail and faxes via the mobile apps, in addition to making outgoing calls.

We found it easy to create call-routing rules, which is important, as that is probably where administrators will spend the bulk of their time. You can decide what happens to an incoming call if you are already on the call, for example. It is a little confusing at first to understand how to create call groups, as opposed to using the Department setting, which actually creates call queues.

In an earlier review, we complained that RingCentral lacked a graphical routing setup like that found in Jive Hosted VoIP, but RingCentral's new Visual IVR editor remedies this, allowing configuration with a graphical interface. It even lets you use drag and drop to configure your automated voice response actions.

RingCentral says customers can scale up to as many phones as needed, and the system will accommodate them. The last time we looked at the service, it didn't have any bulk user-management tools, but the new templates feature lets IT define phone systems settings and easily apply them to a whole group of users in one operation.

Businesses can also integrate the RingCentral system with other SaaS offerings, such as Salesforce, Outlook and Box, in order to expand the functionality available. The caller information shared in Salesforce combined with the phone system would make it easier for businesses to keep on top of customer calls.

Call Quality
Call quality is important, especially in a business environment. During the course of testing, we didn't notice any delays when people spoke, and our conversations were loud and clear. The company does a lot of tweaking internally to make ensure solid call quality, regardless of whether they are using DSL, a cable modem, or some other fast broadband option.

We set up RingCentral on a network with a fairly locked down firewall and encountered no issues or problems with voice quality. RingCentral told us that if users are having a problem with the system, it's typically related to the firewall's configuration. 

Depending on the feature set and call rules in place, callers may hear an extra ring or two as the RingCentral system routes calls over the Internet. If you define call groups, where it will ring different groups of phones until someone picks up, the caller may have more rings than other systems. It's still a pretty quick system from the caller's view.

We tried making phone calls while stressing the network by running BitTorrent and streaming Web conferencing video, but didn't notice any degradation in call service.  It's worth noting that if the network is under heavy load, the Web portal may be a little sluggish. It doesn't affect call quality at all, but the pages on the portal may be slow to load.

Sophisticated and Clear for SMBs
For businesses setting up a VoIP platform for the first time or thinking about abandoning an existing on-premises system, going to the cloud may be the answer. We were impressed at how RingCentral addressed our earlier review's quibbles with new, powerful features. Its system is extremely versatile and can be configured to fit practically any kind of business, whether that's a multi-branch organization, a small operation with a high call volume, or just a sole proprietorship trying to project a professional image. For mobile workforces, RingCentral can route calls to employee cell phones without revealing their personal numbers. We found RingCentral to be an impressive, professional VoIP platform for businesses, and much easier to administer and use than you'd expect in such a complex platform. If you're in the market for a virtual PBX, we recommend RingCentral Office.

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