RingCentral Review: The Best Phone System for Customer Service Teams

Formed way back in 1999, RingCentral is a stalwart of the phone systems market. Our in-depth research shows that RingCentral’s business VoIP system, RingCentral MVP, is the best phone system for customer service teams. It’s also incredibly well-suited to healthcare providers and retail businesses.

When choosing a VoIP system, we recommend comparing four key factors: inbound and outbound communication features, pricing, integrability and scalability, and customer support channels. In this review, we’ll analyse how well RingCentral meets these criteria compared to competitors, while also exploring its pros and cons, and explaining why we’d recommend it to particular businesses.

How much does RingCentral cost?

RingCentral’s price plans:

• Essentials: £7.99 – £12.99 per user, per month
• Standard: £12.99 – £19.99 per user, per month
• Premium: £17.99 – £24.99 per user, per month
• Ultimate: £22.99 – £29.99 per user, per month

The amount you pay within each of these ranges depends on the number of users on the system.

In our value for money analysis, we compared prices from eight different phone system providers, examining the features they offer at each of their pricing tiers. In this, RingCentral didn’t fare so well. We gave it a pretty paltry pricing score of 2.3 out of 5, placing it behind quite a few competitors.

The reason for this is that, while RingCentral’s monthly fees are by no means super expensive, its packages aren’t quite as generous as some of the others we’ve seen. For example, none of them include unlimited domestic minutes – the highest number of minutes you can grab is 4,000 outbound and 2,000 inbound on the Ultimate plan.

And, as you’ll see throughout this review, lots of RingCentral’s most useful features, including call queues, ring groups, and software integrations, are only available on the Premium and Ultimate plans. Plus, video conferencing isn’t available on RingCentral’s cheapest plan, Essentials (we’d argue that video conferencing is essential these days!).

The pros and cons of RingCentral

✓ Biggest range of integrations

In our evaluation of the number of software platforms RingCentral can integrate with, we found that it totally outshines all the competition – earning an impressive integrability score of 4.3 out of 5.

RingCentral MVP comes ready to integrate with an incredible 97 different CRM systems, meaning it’s very likely to be able to sync easily with your system of choice. It also boasts ready-made integrations with 57 different analytics platforms. RingCentral’s competitors don’t come anywhere close to these figures, and in fact, it’s the only UK phone system provider we analysed that even offers integrations with external analytics apps.

RingCentral also offers a good range of ready-made integrations with helpdesk, workspace, and internal and external live chat platforms. Plus, it offers an open API, so you can configure your own integrations if RingCentral can’t immediately sync with the systems you use.

Be aware, though, that all these integrations are only available on RingCentral’s Premium and Ultimate plans (except for integrations with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, which are available on the Standard plan).

✓ Super scalable

We’ve found RingCentral MVP to be one of the most scalable phone systems on the market, earning a massive scalability score of 4.9 out of 5. It’s as easy to scale as 8×8, but beats all the other competitors we researched on this front.

So, what makes RingCentral so easy to evolve alongside your business?

• On the Standard plan and above, RingCentral doesn’t impose any user limits, so your teams have freedom to grow
• You can set up local numbers on all plans, so customers from across the UK can contact you for free
• You can set up call queues and ring groups to better handle growing call volumes (although these features are only available on the Premium and Ultimate plans)
• You can use call barge and call whisper features to train new agents (but, again, only on the Premium and Ultimate plans)
• Team collaboration features, including team messaging, document sharing, task management, and video meetings are available on all plans (except for Essentials, which doesn’t have video meetings)
• Robust security measures mean you can safely handle growing volumes of data

✓ Lots of user support channels

When you’re new to a VoIP system, it helps to know that support is available. Fortunately, you can get in touch with RingCentral at any time via live chat or phone line, both of which are open 24/7. For less urgent queries, you can also reach out to RingCentral via email.

If you were to venture online, you’d find that RingCentral has its own knowledge base and user forum. Handily, it also provides onboarding support to new customers — except for those on the Essentials plan — and comes with a confidence-boosting uptime SLA (service level agreement – which means RingCentral is committed to delivering it) of 99.999%.

✓ Great range of features

When we compared each VoIP provider on features, RingCentral did exceptionally well, scoring 4.3 out of 5. In the breadth of features on offer, RingCentral is beaten only by 8×8. None of the remaining six competitors provide as many sophisticated features as these two systems.

✘ Beaten by competitors on value for money

As we discussed in our pricing section, RingCentral isn’t brilliant when it comes to value for money, scoring just 2.3 out of 5 in our pricing evaluation. Scroll up to our section on how much RingCentral costs to learn more about this.

✘ Mediocre user review rating

We analysed reviews from users across G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and TrustRadius. Across these software review sites, RingCentral has earned an average user review rating of 3.5 out of 5. It’s the same score that 8×8 earned, and in this, the two of them trail behind all the other providers we researched. Nuacom, with an average rating of 4.6, is the brand that beats them most soundly in the customer satisfaction stakes.

RingCentral’s customer service is a point of contention for lots of reviewers, who say it can take a long time to get through to someone on the right team. They also warn that RingCentral’s contracts renew automatically and can be difficult to cancel.

RingCentral’s standout features

Robust add-ons

RingCentral comes with a variety of add-ons to enhance your capabilities as a team. Let’s take a look at them:

• RingCentral Webinar: currently available as a free Beta version, this enables you to set up and run your own interactive webinars.
• RingCentral Contact Centre: this helps your team manage customer contact via a dedicated dashboard, and an omnichannel platform through which your agents can connect with customers across all your digital channels. It also comes with coaching and feedback tools.
• RingCentral Engage Digital: this helps customer service agents to manage their calls through a unique interface, helping to improve response times and streamline agent allocation.

Mobile app

Like all modern VoIP systems should, RingCentral comes in app form (as well as a browser version) so your team can use it to seamlessly take calls, join video meetings, send messages, and more on their mobile devices, making remote and hybrid working much easier.

What kind of business is RingCentral best for?

When we analysed the suitability of each phone system for different industries, RingCentral fared really well – shining as the best system for customer service teams, healthcare providers, and retail businesses.

So, what makes RingCentral such a great shout for these industries? Well, firstly, all these businesses need to be equipped to handle lots of incoming calls with ease. RingCentral offers great inbound communications features that enable this, including:

• Virtual receptionist
• Call queues (on the Premium and Ultimate plans)
• Ring groups (on the Premium and Ultimate plans)
• The ability to set up local numbers
• The ability to set up company hours at which phone lines open and close
• The ability to have customers get in touch via SMS or video call

But what else? Let’s take a look at the other ways in which RingCentral is tailored to these three industries.

Customer service teams

It’s really important for customer service teams to practise pristine phone manner. RingCentral comes with a number of features to help you train up your customer service reps. Call transcripts are available on all plans, and call recording unlocks if you upgrade to Standard. Call monitoring, call whisper, and call barging are available on the Premium and Ultimate plans.

Customer service teams also tend to use lots of different software to store and transfer customer data, and offer varied communication channels to customers. So it’s great that RingCentral comes ready to integrate with an unbeatable variety of CRM systems, as well as helpdesk, workspace, messaging, and web conferencing platforms.

Healthcare providers

Healthcare providers handle all sorts of personal, highly sensitive patient information. RingCentral stands out for its top notch data security features, earning a score of 4 out of 5 in our security analysis. It boasts multiple third-party compliance certifications, as well as multi-factor login authentication, data encryption, and the ability to set up user permissions so only certain users can access certain parts of the system (though this feature is only available on Premium and Ultimate).

Healthcare providers also need to be able to communicate with patients and colleagues in lots of different contexts. RingCentral enables you to send SMS messages to patients, conduct remote appointments via video chat, share files and send and receive e-faxes, and reach out to colleagues via internal chat and video calls.

Retail businesses

It’s important for retail businesses to be able to create personalised experiences for each customer. The fact that RingCentral can readily integrate with a great range of CRM, helpdesk, and workspace systems means customer purchase histories and contact records are easily accessible.

Effective training is also crucial in a retail environment, and RingCentral comes with a variety of features to help upskill your team. Call transcripts are available on all plans, and call recording unlocks if you upgrade to Standard. Call monitoring, call whisper, and call barging are available on the Premium and Ultimate plans.

How does RingCentral compare to its competitors?

At the very start of this review, we talked about the four key factors you should compare when choosing your next phone system provider. Let’s take a look at these all-important points and see how well RingCentral’s phone system compares to its competitors.

1. Inbound and outbound communication features

RingCentral offers a fantastic range of inbound communication features, including all those we cover in the section above and more. It’s worth being aware that, as ring groups and call queues are only available on Premium and Ultimate, RingCentral doesn’t offer all our favourite inbound comms features on its cheapest plans – but only one of its competitors, GoToConnect, does. Read more in our GoToConnect review. Overall, RingCentral’s inbound call features notably outshine those provided by Vonage, Google Voice, and bOnline.

RingCentral’s Essentials plan is pretty poor for outbound comms features, with only caller ID setup and external SMS available. However, features like generous external video calling and call conferencing quickly become available on higher plans. This is similar to competitors across the board.

2. Price

RingCentral’s packages don’t offer as much value for money as GoToConnect, bOnline, and Vonage (read our Vonage review), who offer the most generously featureful pricing plans. Dialpad, Nuacom, and 8×8 also offer more value for money than RingCentral, but by a much slimmer margin.

That said, if you’re looking for sheer affordability over value for money, you should know that RingCentral’s pricing range of £7.99 to £29.99 is cheaper than many competitors’, including GoToConnect (£10 to £44), 8×8 (£10 to £135), and Nuacom (£14.99 up to bespoke prices).

3. Integrability and scalability

As we’ve mentioned, RingCentral comes ready to integrate with a dazzling array of software platforms – more than any of its competitors.

We’ve also found it to be an incredibly scalable system. RingCentral is just as easy to scale as 8×8, and a little easier to scale than Vonage and GoToConnect. It’s much easier to scale than Nuacom, Dialpad, bOnline, and Google Voice, all of which didn’t score well in our scalability analysis.

4. Customer support channels

As we’ve explored, RingCentral provides plenty of ways for you to reach its team. RingCentral and 8×8 lead this charge together, both scoring a perfect 5 out of 5 for the variety of user contact and support channels they offer.

That said, RingCentral doesn’t provide onboarding support on Essentials, it’s cheapest plan. If you’re looking to invest in a basic plan but need onboarding support, know that you will get it with GoToConnect and Nuacom’s cheapest packages.

Does RingCentral have good customer reviews?

When you’re looking for a new phone system, investigating users’ experiences and insights can be an extremely valuable way to work out whether a system is right for you or not.

We’ve already discussed the fact that RingCentral has a mediocre average customer review rating of 3.5 out of 5. Let’s take a look at what users are saying about the provider:

How We Reviewed RingCentral