The communications artificial intelligence wars continue unabated as every unified communications-as-a-service and contact center-as-a-service vendor loads its products with new capabilities to one-up the competition.

Today RingCentral Inc. added several new capabilities to RingCX, its AI-powered contact center solution. The California-based contact center solutions provider has added about 300 features to RingCX in the past quarter, bringing the total to more than 1,300.

It has been under a year since RingCentral introduced the product. At the time, it offered basic contact center capabilities and was a good add-on to its UCaaS base, but it posed no threat to the incumbents. Nine months later, the product has been beefed up with all the core and several advanced capabilities, enabling RingCentral to win contact center-only deals. To date, RingCentral has added more than 350 new RingCX customers.

The new AI-centric capabilities are designed to enable RingCentral to expand its market penetration. They will be generally available in the U.S. in the coming months, and international availability is expected in early 2025. But in what it’s calling an early-access preview, RingCentral will let customers use the latest offerings so it can collect real-world user feedback. The company said it would finalize pricing and other details before general availability.

Why expand AI? It’s what customers want

The fundamental thesis of my research is that market share changes only happen when markets transition. This means jumping into a market late never works.

Before the launch of RingCX, the company offered a contact center as a resale of NICE, and many industry watchers had been expecting RingCentral to roll their own for years. Instead, the company waited for the right moment and used the AI inflection point to come to market.

RingCX isn’t an older product with AI bolted on – rather, it was built with AI as a foundational component. Now, RingCentral is expanding those capabilities to provide greater value to its customers. The new RingCX capabilities announced today include:

• Native AI Agent Assist: As contact center agents engage with customers, AI will listen to the calls and give agents real-time contextual suggestions for responding effectively to questions, objections and other issues. The goal is to ensure more accurate, timely and personalized resolutions so agents can resolve calls more quickly and effectively. The company said AI Agent Assist can incorporate existing company content — web pages, user guides, troubleshooting manuals and the like — into real-time “native-AI” agent suggestions. The new capabilities were designed to make contact center technology easy for businesses to set up and use. RingCentral will continue to offer more sophisticated and customized enterprise capabilities through its relationship with Balto.

• AI Supervisor Assist: Another upcoming RingCX innovation, which I expect will be well-received, will use that same real-time listening capability to provide immediate notification of any issues that arise during calls to the contact center. The company says supervisors will get one-click access to detailed transcripts and concise conversation summaries. The idea is for supervisors to be able to assess situations rapidly so they can take action that will benefit both customers and agents.

• AI Coaching Insights: Though the instant information sent to supervisors will undoubtedly have value, the bigger picture of refining the skills and performance of contact center agents has even greater long-term potential. Coaching Insights builds on RingCentral’s existing RingSense AI Quality Management offering. The new AI-based solution will automatically analyze every customer interaction of each agent and produce automated “coaching” suggestions. The customized feedback will identify any knowledge gaps an agent needs to work on. The goal is to ensure agents have consistent, high-quality calls with every customer. “AI gives a single dashboard for each agent’s performance,” Andy Watson, senior product marketing manager for RingCentral’s CX portfolio, said on a product briefing. “It will tell us what they’re good at and opportunities for improvement.”

• Bring-your-own IVA: Customers already using an intelligent virtual agent to deliver customer service over voice and digital channels can use open application programming interfaces to integrate their preferred IVA to RingCX. Watson said the company’s APIs will connect any IVA using Restful APIs, removing entry barriers for many organizations.

After being briefed, I contacted Joe Rittenhouse, co-chief executive of Converged Technology Pros, one of RingCentral’s top resellers, and asked him his opinion. “RingCX, albeit late, has been a game changer for us,” he told me. “We have been impressed by the pace of innovation, which has quickly closed the feature gap. The focus on ease of use has been a differentiator with customers.”

Despite years of innovation and a shift to the cloud, the average contact center interaction often leaves something to be desired. AI is the most significant change agent in this industry, perhaps ever, as it enables brands to provide accurate, personalized information faster whether a human agent is used or not.

The new RingCX capabilities are the latest example of how pervasive AI is becoming in countless customer-facing business engagements. There is much more to come from all corners of the AI marketplace. I can’t wait to see what’s next, as the contact center industry stands to benefit from AI disproportionately.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Image: RingCentral