According to the Belmont, Calif.-based firm, RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0 brings the company’s cloud PBX capabilities into Microsoft Teams with a fully native experience without requiring a second application, giving customers the ability to use RingCentral features and third-party integration capabilities entirely within Teams.

RingCentral says the enhanced integration delivers a purpose-built experience with productivity-boosting features such as voicemail transcription, call recording, bi-directional presence sync and unified contact search. It can also be coupled with RingCentral Contact Center.

According to RingCentral, the majority of Microsoft Teams customers have Microsoft E1 or E3 licenses, which don’t include telephony, requiring customers to purchase a calling plan or Teams Phone license at an additional cost. With RingCentral, telephony is included with all licenses, giving customers an integrated, cloud-based phone service for Microsoft Teams that offers call routing, custom call queues, automatic call recording, over 330 pre-built integrations and analytics.

The company adds that it also provides a smart sidecar panel for quick access to key contacts and advanced call features, like monitor, whisper, barge-in, and queue management, all available on desktop and mobile devices.

Mo Katibeh, president and chief operating officer of RingCentral, says in a statement, that while many businesses have standardized on Teams for internal collaboration, customers often seek out third-party solutions for more advanced communications.

“When customer communications are critical, businesses look to RingCentral, given our reputation for 99.999% reliability and our robust and advanced telephony capabilities,” Katibeh says. “We’re excited to deliver this next generation of RingCentral for Microsoft Teams, and empower customers with faster performance, deeper integration, a new mobile experience, and simpler admin tools.”

Key features of the RingCentral for Microsoft Teams 2.0 solution include:

• Bi-directional presence sync provides user availability wherever communication happens.
• New unified contact searching from RingCentral and Microsoft directories.
• Industry-leading, out-of-the-box analytics for every department with no Power BI license or specialized services needed.
• Extensive set of telephony app integrations to connect CRMs and business apps.
• Deep integration with Teams mobile app that allows users to place and receive calls through the RingCentral integration in the Microsoft Teams mobile app.
• A certified contact center solution for Microsoft Teams that allows customers to complement their integrated business telephony with an AI-powered contact center within Microsoft Teams.
• A fully-integrated advanced telephony experience in Teams.
• Over 19 quarters of secure, compliant 99.999% uptime, according to RingCentral.

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The new offerings are Spectrum Business Connect with RingCentral and Spectrum Enterprise Unified Communications with RingCentral, a combination of RingCentral’s collaboration solutions and high-speed internet from Charter subsidiary Spectrum.

According to the companies, the new offerings are designed to meet customers wherever they are and help them leverage their preferred channels of communication to connect with employees, customers, suppliers and partners.

The offerings bring “hundreds of key new features” across phone, message and video released by RingCentral over the past year to help Charter customers streamline and modernize their communications.

Spectrum Business Connect with RingCentral is available now in more than 90% of Spectrum markets and will become fully available across the company’s entire 41-state service area in the coming months, the companies say.

RingCentral is the exclusive Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) provider for Spectrum Business Connect. Spectrum Enterprise Unified Communications with RingCentral will be available nationally early next month, according to the firms.

The combination of high-speed broadband services with cloud-based communications gives customers a fully optimized end-to-end solution that provides secure and reliable management of business communications, says Homayoun Razavi, chief business development officer at RingCentral.

“We are very excited about our new relationship with Charter Communications,” Razavi  says. “Together, we can provide a variety of businesses across a number of sectors–including healthcare, hospitality and education–a truly hassle-free solution with one stop for implementation and onboarding, billing, and support.”

Danny Bowman, Charter’s chief mobile officer, says workplace communications are dramatically shifting, so the company needs to accommodate their customers as their needs change.

“Spectrum’s new RingCentral solutions will enable our business clients of all sizes to adapt to today’s rapidly changing work environment, giving them the flexibility and remote capabilities they require,” Bowman says.

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The communication and collaboration provider says it conducted a survey of business owners and how they plan to communicate with customers and employees in the coming year and found that more than 90% say phones are still considered a key communication tool.

Even at businesses that don’t consider the phone to be their primary communication channel, 40% still say it’s one of their main tools.

According to RingCentral, 58% of small companies with fewer than 100 employees were most likely to say phone is their primary communication tool, and 56% of large businesses with between 1,000 and 9,999 employees said the same. Between businesses and enterprises of all sizes, 52.1% said phone is their primary communication method.

RingCentral also found that phone calls are more popular for both internal and external business communication.

According to their responses, business leaders prefer phone conversations when speaking with individuals instead of groups. Here’s the breakdown:

• Internal calls: 73.8%
• Internal meetings: 58.6%
• External client calls: 82%
• External client meetings: 60.8%
• External vendor calls: 69.6%
• External vendor meetings: 49%
• Outbound customer calls: 63.4%
• Inbound customer service: 52.1%

Even when speaking to groups of team members or customers in meetings, more than half prefer to use phones.

Although cloud telephony is becoming more popular, RingCentral found that traditional business phone systems are still more popular. According to the survey, 64.8% of employees use a business number on a mobile phone and 50.1% use a personal number of their mobile phone for business. Further, 53.2% use legacy on-premises pones for business communication.

Meanwhile, 30.7% of companies surveyed use cloud-based phone systems, a trend expected to increase with the rise of remote and hybrid work.

About 63% of businesses told RingCentral that they expect phone use to increase over the next few years, but they want flexible, multi-device phone solutions to do so. For example, cited the ability to make and receive calls and send business SMS message from a personal computer as their most requested features. Others include cloud recordings of calls, high-volume SMS for marketing and customer care, migrating existing phone numbers to a new provider, logging calls in CRM platforms, visual voicemail and more.

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In the post-pandemic world, digital signage is again changing. Its importance, however, is not diminished: it is expected to have a 7% compound annual growth rate from 2021 to 2026.

Digital signage solutions are endlessly adaptable and can be profitable in any setting. Below are some ideas that will surely help revolutionize your use of this exciting technology.

1. Employee Spotlights

As we’ve mentioned, the focus of digital signage has been quickly changing in the post-pandemic period. So is work, with many returning to the office after a long time. A good strategy to make the workspace more stimulating is to integrate visual displays.

What better way to use this tech than for celebrating employees? You can highlight their skills and achievements to colleagues and clients alike, improve morale and productivity, and encourage team building.

2. Help and FAQs

For a client dealing with an unfamiliar situation, it’s always reassuring to have some clear guidance. Using a screen in the waiting room to display FAQs or a walkthrough of the process (for example, opening a new bank account) is very effective.

To drive home that your company is here for them, you should also display contact information. A toll-free number is particularly good: It removes the cost of interacting with the company and provides support to customers who don’t feel comfortable using the internet or who want more direct human contact.

3. Trivia Quizzes

A fun trivia quiz with some interesting facts about your company’s line of work allows you to share information about your industry without it feeling forced. It stands out from more generic signaling and piques the curiosity of your customers.

Even now that we carry our smartphones with us everywhere, it can be a welcome break to lift your eyes from the endless scroll and challenge yourself to a little quiz to pass the time.

4. Exhibitions

Continuing the trend of fun and informative digital displays, it would be impossible not to mention museums. Most major exhibitions nowadays use digital signage, often in a very interactive fashion, to complement their physical setups. These displays can also interface with custom apps, thus creating an unforgettable multimedia experience.

5. User-Generated Content

Displaying customers’ social media posts is a great way of using both the far reach of the internet and the familiarity of word-of-mouth type testimonies. You can feature the most recent posts, have a carousel of reviews of your product or show publications from your brand’s sponsors. This is a fantastic way to use your affiliate network, as well, associating digital affiliate posts with a physical setting.

6. Schedules and Appointments

Working from home is now the norm in many places and that has changed attitudes towards many aspects of work. The conference room is now often a virtual space, and online conferencing technology has taken a prominent role.

For those companies that are going back to the office, it is still important to use technology to their advantage. Calendar screens help employees organize their busy schedules and myriad appointments. A simple glance is enough to be reminded of incoming commitments.

7. QR Code Resources

QR codes are also quickly growing in popularity, saving us the hassle of copying links or searching for websites. They are thus perfect to integrate with digital signage. Scanning the screen provides access to a wealth of resources, right there on your smartphone. Examples of this are sales coupons in stores, up-to-date menus in restaurants, informative paperless brochures in tourist sights and much more.

8. Company Stats

Readily available data is recognized as a powerful propeller of businesses. Data-driven companies’ strategies are intertwined with employee productivity, and these businesses have community as part of their culture. As such, displaying data and statistics can be a great way to better analyze it and improve efficiency.

For example, as an online business grows, shipping and orders can become very complex. Creating adequate strategies for things such as Shopify order fulfillment can be more effective if the information is available to a wide group of people.

9. Live Transportation Updates

Even though most people use the maps on their phones, these can be inadequate. They often fail at displaying precise locations and arrivals at bus stops, updated routes, unexpected traffic and other variables.

Displaying transport information — such as the next station on a route — can provide a better experience, especially for inexperienced users.

10. Company Websites

We left the simplest for last. Using screens to display the official website and some crucial information is straightforward and effective. If your online content is easily accessible and the contacts shown are working, you can let your site speak for itself.

To make sure there are no interruptions in the service, it can be good to opt for a bring-your-own-carrier service so that you’re not at the mercy of traditional providers.

Conclusion

These ideas can be applied to almost any industry and company, and are sure to make a positive impact. But they’re not the only ones; the great thing about digital signage is it can be whatever you need it to be.

This article originally appeared on MyTechDecisions’ sister-site CommercialIntegrator.com.

Samantha Clayton is a content specialist at RingCentral, a provider of cloud communications and predictive dialer worldwide. She is passionate about creating compelling angles for content and finding out about people’s interests and passions, ensuring a better experience for customers and partners. Also, she has extensive experience in content writing and strategy and has been an account and senior manager in tech and communications industries. You can check her on LinkedIn.

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