RingCentral MVP Reviews: 4.0/5 — Solid Choice

The ability to receive calls on the desktop, cell phone, or desk phone is extremely convenient. Also nice to not have an in house server you have to manage in favor of a 24/7 managed cloud service.

It was extremely oversold. We were constantly told about features and then when we asked for them were handed dollar signs. We have outages on and off sporadically with no warning. Some features are just poorly designed and make little sense. Can't add outside users to Precense on phone? Paging for only a limited amount of phones? Causes more issues than it solves.

Keeping us connected no matter where we are for the good and the bad.

Ease of install; quick to get up and running; works with most types of networks without having to have special performance improvements or QoS configuration.

Different software apps are used for different purposes, making for a very disjointed user experience. Difficult to click-and-dial in many situations. Joining a meeting, for example, is difficult because keying in meeting numbers after the original number can't be done via cut-and-paste. Application UI is non-optimal, requiring extra keystrokes or screen changes to perform actions. I especially dislike this because I'm already somewhat distracted by the fact that I'm on a phone call and am trying to do something like mute my phone or key in a meeting number with the least distraction possible. I didn't find any differentiator between RingCentral and competitors; some of the start-ups have some nicer approaches to coordinated software and improved UI/UX.

Many offices, each with their own phone system, didn't have a central directory or automated attendant. RingCentral gave this to us (like most other cloud PBX providers would). The central directory and automated attendant are successful, but unfortunately we can't correlate our internal extensions to the public number, so for example if someone's number is 415-555-1212 you'd like to make their internal extension 212, but we can't make that happen easily. The administration screen is OK but not always intuitive.

Ability to move from one location to another.

Consistency of service is a challenge, and support is lacking and very slow. When sold as a solution for business the support for business impacting issues (ie. my tech support staff cannot open the program after a windows update) needs to be better than "sometime in the next week".

A small call center solution, about 20 staff, big enough to need call center features but not big enough for call center infrastructure.

Programmability is fairly good. Service is quick.

Major flaws in this program: 1. Admins are unable to control Do not Disturb or Out of Office for agents. This means you can't turn an agent off to receiving calls in their absence, so the queue continually rings their phone. 2. Have to use the meeting app for video calling. Ridiculous! There needs to be something like Skype, Google Hangouts or Facetime function 3. When a user transfers a call, the transferring extension shows up instead of the original Caller ID.

Modernizing phone system, directing calls to the correct agent. It's helped our team immensely.

My favorite thing about the service is that I can take a day off without worrying about missing a call from an important client or vendor.

I haven't had any real problems with it. I have to remember to change when it goes directly to voicemail, so that I'm not bothered by it dinner or some other personal time.

My accessibility is greatly improved, and I can relax more although that seems strange, knowing that I'm not missing anything important.

Gmail integration works pretty well. Easy to look at colleague calendars to find available times to book meetings. I also think that joining meetings by mobile app is pretty easy.

Hard for some contacts to join meetings, especially if they've never used RingCentral before or can't download outside applications to their computer. If you are selling into a company that has heavy IT security (like a bank), forget about RingCentral. Hate how my computer app logs out every couple weeks. I'm a new Mac user, but RingCentral seems to install funny and makes me finalize installation every time i turn my computer off.

I'm not sure what RingCentral costs but I'm sure it must be cheaper than webex, which could be a benefit to you, I guess.

I really like RingCentrals ability to receive calls anywhere using a desk phone, soft phone, or your mobile device. I also like its ease of use when setting up conference calls or video conferences.

From my experience RingCentals performance has been spotty at best. I have dropped a lot of calls when using my soft phone. This is a VoIP system though so the performance issues might be coming from ISP and not RingCentral.

RingCentral has given me the ability to answer my direct business line from anywhere. It has made me a lot easier to get ahold of. It has also improved my web and video conferences with its easy to use interface.

The design concepts of Ring Central are pretty nice. Screen sharing doesn't seem like it should be rocket science, RingCentral doesn't treat it as such. Concepts like not requiring "Passing the Ball" for someone to share, easily controlling your participants audio, and selecting a single app to share are just as easy as you would expect them to be. The video conferencing performance is among the best I have used. The video is clear and the app responds to who is talking better than others I have used. The screen sharing app works with any size display, which is not the case with all competitive tools

The way that shared screens are displayed is not great. You can go full screen. You can go windowed to a size that RingCentral picks. You cannot adjust to a size in between. When someone is sharing from a big external monitor you just have to deal with the fact that you will not be able to read what they are sharing. Logging into the application is terrible. For a locally installed app I find it bizarre that it logs you out seemingly after each meeting. To make matters worse you login with: 1. your company's phone number 2.your extension 3. a password, which isn't convenient in an age when I don't have my company's front desk phone committed to memory. The audio quality of phone calls is poor at least 25% of the time. Scheduling meetings on the fly is harder than it should be. Launching meetings from links is not supported in all browsers

I primarily use this application for video conferencing and screen sharing conference calls. Since RingCentral is not as big and WebEx and GotoMeeting many times, guests will have to download the client. In my opinion, the screen sharing and teleconferencing experience is a simple concept that is over complicated by all vendors. RingCentral is no different and has it's own set of challenges.

As an administrator using the product it's relatively straight-forward to add new users, order new phones, and manage the system. This is thanks to the streamlined interface on their site. Call clarity is above average and the feature set is impressive. Video conferences and screen-sharing work well assuming you have no troubles along the way.

More and more problems crop up as time goes on. Ghosting of calls where multiple people will be connected to a call but are unable to hear someone else who is in the call is becoming prevalent. Issues with one of the most popular browsers, Chrome, also prove to be an annoyance.

We're attempting to become more connected to each other and our clients. Some departments need to demo our product to customers, while others need to transmit information within the company. For the most part we can solve these business problems but the longer the system is in place the more I begin to wonder if it's sufficient. They boast a large set of features but maybe they're unable to succeed on all fronts.

It's a complete platform, easy to use in both admin portal and user experience. Reporting side is really good, you can schedule reports to be sent without having to do that manually.

There is no support whatsover, whenever an issue arises and we contact tech support or our sales rep, the response is non-existent. The resolution they give have already been done on our end and they don't know how else to help resolve it, By the time they respond with an answer, it has already been fixed. Porting out from RingCentral is extremely tedious

We had to reach out to the Chief executives on LinkedIn to be able to have someone help us out with the port out. The amount of calls made to have a solution to our issue were just too much and we always received the same useless answer

It makes it easy to communicate between colleagues and customers.

Some of its features are difficult to find in the user panel.

Communicating with other people in different countries through VoIP.

RingCentral tries very hard to have their phone service be reliable. Their service itself rarely goes down which is great. Their support was actually not bad. They would flat out tell you if something in the admin portal was bad and would either teach you or do the process themselves depending on what you want. I like that.

RingCentral has the following struggles: - App management. RingCentral had multiple competing apps while we used them, and it was never clear which ones were deprecated. For example, their phone only app, was technically deprecated, but their other app (Glip) did not work with the Salesforce integration. - User management. Device and user management is archaic at best. Let's say you need to add a phone number that you have previously used to another user. If you aren't careful, it will double bill the user. Same if you want to add a physical phone to a softphone user. I found one user who was billed three times, or over $100! - Relationship management. Our RMs did not care that RingCentral naturally billed users more than expected due to the previous issue. They also didn't care that we could't delete unused users, since that would lower our bill. Due to these issues, I don't recommend RingCentral. Although, I recognize there must be good engineers and support workers.

We wanted a reliable VoIP solution that was easily to administrate. We did not get that.

The seamless transition of calls between devices such as softphones, computer application, and the desktop phone is effortless and not noticeable to the caller. The Salesforce integration was simple to set up and maintain.

Each time I make a call, I have the acknowledge the E911 warning, which becomes annoying. The call recording feature only stores calls going back 90 days. The administration panel is not the smoothest out there and can be frustrating to work within.

Having a dedicated office line instead of using our personal phones allows for us to be able to disconnect from work when we are "off the clock". The shared fax line is nice, though we have never used it.

It is cost-effective and that's the only reason we procured

GUI is very hefty, it has features, that are generalized and displayed on-screen but cannot be accessed easily. The desktop looks so unclean when using this. Also, because of many features, the system slows down. And the worst part, users need to install it, there's no web version for users to join it.

Only remote meeting is achieved

Easy sign-on. Accounts remain logged in indefinitely. Boxed visuals for every call participant.

Its very difficult to use two screens to present and view participants simultaneously. There is no calendar integration with outlook so you need to open meetings from Outlook instead of from the application directly. When you schedule an appointment from the app, it always starts with the current day and time instead of providing a calendar to select the meeting day & time. Clients often complain they have trouble accessing the meetings. Zoom used to accommodate RingCentral meeting IDs but has since stopped supporting this application, making it harder for more people to access the sessions.

We use Ring Central for Internal team meetings, sales presentations, and client meetings.

I like the notification options - email, text, push, etc.

It is incredibly complicated to set up, especially compared to Jive, which we came from. Their promise of meeting competitor pricing is not completely accurate and they will do anything to get out of it. It is pricey compared to alternatives. The support is terrible - it takes forever to get through to someone and they usually mess up the phone line worse than it originally was. Call routing is tedious and not user friendly. The phone does not actually ring for every call on iOS, but they refuse to admit it is an issue. You cannot see a call waiting if you're on the line, so if you're talking to a technician you can't see that a customer is calling in to hang up on the technician and take the call.

We can answer the phone when customers call - if the phone actually rings on the softphone.

I like that it's easy for anyone to project or take over to share their screen. We have a lot of remote team members across the United States and in Uruguay so it's nice we have a place we can all have a meeting.

I have a lot of issues of dial-ins not working or malfunctioning so meeting tend to start 10 minutes late just trying to get the software or dial-in to work properly. I would love it if we didn't have to spend extra time setting up and then trying to get everyone dialed-in.

The benefits are the screen sharing capabilities and being able to meet with anyone all over the world. I would love to solve the dial-in and setup time issues we currently face in our organization with this software.

There are so many options are far are users, phone numbers and personalization

It's very difficult to find someone to talk to for help, and even harder to find someone who speaks English well. Call center agents not trained well

Makes calling easier

Ring Central has not fixed all our VOIP problems but it does allow up to have calls on our cell phones. It has improved some in sound clarity but it's still kind of weird.

I don't like how you can't tell if it's ring central call or a call to my personal number

It got rid of our office phone.

I really liked how easy it was to navigate and send a fax.

I didnt like the call monitoring aspect and how uclear the calls were.

increase our sales

Glip is the only product I use every day that I enjoy using/find easy.

RingCentral Phone Services, dialing, calling, communicating internally.

Glip provides team chats that do not disappear.

It’s a reasonable service and after we negotiated a discount for our non-profit, at a reasonable cost.

I know this might not bother others, but I absolutely *HATE* that they add a line item in the bill for "RingCentral Compliance and Administrative Cost Recovery Fee". If you dig in further, they do eventually say "The CRF is not a tax, nor is it mandated by any level of government or government agency." It is simply the cost of doing business, but they tack it onto the section containing all of the other government mandated taxes and fees to disguise it and so they can have a lower advertised base cost of the service. It really speaks volumes to me how a company that would do this views its customers.

VoIP is really the best way to go for phone service these days. The call routing features are great, especially when people are out of the office and we need to cover calls into the main line.

I use as backup fax system when faxes don't go thru my primary fax system. I like that I can preview the documents with one click. No need to download and then open documents. Is all on one screen.

I don't see a way to retrieve faxes if I delete by mistake. I will like to have a folder to store completed faxes or deleted to retrieve later if needed.

As a backup when I sender have problems faxing on primary fax system. Be able to obtain important documents quickly

RingCentral has a great concept. The idea that you can have multiple users, simul-ringing to those users, so the clients never reach a voicemail, is great. Being able to text and make calls from the computer is great, too.

We've unfortunately had nothing but problems since signing up. The app on the phone only works half the time. The app on the computer and the app on the phone, if on at the same time, create errors where if I answer on the phone, the computer is still ringing and sends people to voicemail. I've had to have my extension deleted and a new one created because the extension was "corrupted." When I asked why, they couldn't give me a reason, they just said it happens sometimes but it's rare. My voicemail wasn't working for a long time, it kept going to the computer generated voicemail. We wanted personalization so people didn't feel like they were calling a corporation and it took weeks to get this right. I have had situations where I don't get a phone call at all, neither the app on my phone or the desktop app will ring at all. Every time I need to contact customer service, they're great, but it's a lengthy call and I shouldn't need to call them as often as I have. Plus, the system in general is confusing and not super user friendly. We signed up and I had to wait 2 weeks to get the introductory webinar to teach me how to use everything. During that call, he couldn't teach me what I needed to know in 1 hour so I had to schedule a 2nd call. We missed out on a listing during this transition because a call came through that we never received and went into a voicemail box we hadn't set up yet so it wasn't being check. By the time we got to the voicemail (1 day later) the people had already hired another agent. I also drop calls, a lot, which I think has more to do with my wireless connection than anything but it would be great if the apps would automatically switch to my phone network if the signal fades on the wireless end.

I work remotely from another state so this has solved the issue of needing a local number and being able to text and call right from my computer. If we could just get rid of these other issues, it would be great.

It connects well with the CRM and tracks the time and amount of phone calls made, making it easy to set and reach the goals within your metric settings.

It is a very unstable product. Sometimes the connection is so bad that the other person tells me that they couldn't understand a word I said in a voicemail. Also the connection between ring central and the CRM software is constantly needing to be re-connected. The ear piece is not always the most comfortable and microphone makes you sound like you are underwater at times. Constantly goes offline in the the middle of a conversation.

Right now the only benefit that has been realized is that it is the best product on the market and I use that term loosely.

Easy to access voicemails online or through the internet

Not easily used across different platforms

centralized phone service

I like RingCentral's easy to use features, such as transferring calls, flipping between calls and accessing the keypad. RingCentral also makes it easy to change your caller ID if calling to different areas of the country. RingCentral's integration with other apps like SalesForce is also another reason my company went with the service.

I've had many issues with RingCentral's input volume. No matter the type of mic I use, I have issues with the input volume increasing to a point where the person I'm speaking to asks why the phone quality is "scratchy" or like I'm in a tunnel. With each update I hope that RingCentral improves the input volume quality. I've found that I must physically hold the input volume at the lowest setting in order to make the issue less noticeable. This is very cumbersome and not something I'd suggest as a work-around.

RingCentral allows me easy call integration with other apps in my desktop. By integrating with other apps, I can track calls in/out. I can also dial easier and faster (which allows me to make more calls). Another issue RingCentral has solved is flipping between caller IDs for various locales across the USA. When working in Inside Sales, it's very important to have a local calling number on hand to offer my Clients an easy and affordable call back.

The ability to use it remotely on your computer or phone.

The Support Team is not good at resolving issues. Each phone call has been over an hour and the issue still is not fixed.

The cost is less than using a phone carrier such as Spectrum. Being able to utilize the system remotely.

It makes calls. That's really just about it. It has no notable good features. There is really not a lot that can be added to the positives column on this one beyond that.

Ring Central is slow, clunky, and quite meh. It's not a great program, though it does the job in a semi-adequate manner, I suppose. But it is always a hassle to deal with.

It makes calls. There is no other usage for it that our organization made, or has made of the software, now or in the past. The ability to make calls from one's computer.

I did like how easy it was to install and the service provided

I didn't like how difficult it was to get working properly, I had a lot of tech issues and it took quite awhile to get the video call started

Communication while working from, staying up to date with coworkers and their projects, more personable communication than email or phone call