Enhance Teams Calling Capabilities with RingCentral Integration

Enhance Teams Calling Capabilities with RingCentral Integration

Microsoft Teams is the world’s most popular business communications and collaboration service, but as we noted in our last post, the platform has considerable limitations when it comes to telephony. It’s why 85 percent of Teams users surveyed by the Cavell Group report that they leverage a third-party telephony partner instead of using a Microsoft calling plan.

RingCentral’s advanced cloud phone system has proven to be an effective choice for enhancing Teams’ voice capabilities. When integrated with the Teams app, RingCentral Cloud PBX enables a multitude of enterprise-grade calling features that greatly improve Teams’ functionality.

Beyond making and receiving phone calls, Teams offers very few native calling features. However, integration with RingCentral presents users with an array of advanced features such as call waiting, routing, screening and forwarding, as well as caller ID, interactive voice response (IRV), text messaging, faxing and many others.

Improving Productivity and Reliability

User productivity gets a boost with innovative features such as automatic call recording, reports and analytics. A voicemail-to-email feature lets users receive voicemail messages in their email inbox, making it easier to stay in touch with contacts when away from the phone. For added convenience, RingCentral allows users to seamlessly switch between desk phones, softphones and mobile phones.

Best of all, these enhancements feel like a natural extension of the Teams environment. Since the RingCentral Cloud PBX integrates natively into Teams, users enjoy the same Teams interface they’re accustomed to using with no additional downloads, bots or plugins. With little to no learning curve, user adoption of the RingCentral features is a breeze.

RingCentral also delivers more reliable voice calling within Teams. RingCentral offers an uptime SLA of 99.999 percent, which translates to less than six minutes of downtime per year. That’s a significant improvement over Microsoft’s four-nines uptime guarantee for Teams, which allows for more than 52 minutes of downtime per year.

Improved reach is another benefit. Microsoft’s calling plans are limited to just 10 countries, but RingCentral provides true global coverage with native connections to phone services in 45 countries and territories. It also has local dialing options in more than 110 countries through international virtual numbers.

Developer and Analytics Portals

RingCentral offers more than 330 out-of-the-box integrations with leading business apps, including Salesforce, Zendesk and Microsoft Dynamics 365. For example, integration with Salesforce allows businesses to make and receive calls directly within the Salesforce platform, ensuring that all communication is logged and tracked. In addition, a developer portal provides access to more than 500 publicly available APIs and SDKs that can be used to create custom solutions that incorporate voice, video or messaging capabilities into your applications.

In addition, RingCentral makes it easy to manage all their communication workflows. An analytics portal provides complete visibility into all your voice communications within Teams so you can identify key trends, set automated alerts, access quality of service data and more. The analytics portal is particularly useful in contact center environments. Tracking customer engagements offers important insights into time spent on billing questions, collections, invoicing and other customer service issues. In addition, analyzing historical call data can help improve customer experience, agent performance, customer service and operational efficiency.

Microsoft Teams’ native telephony capabilities aren’t sophisticated enough for most businesses, but those limitations can be easily addressed with the integration of RingCentral Cloud PBX. In our next post, we’ll discuss options for deploying RingCentral within Teams.


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