The News: RingCentral today announced RingSense, the AI-based conversation intelligence solution intended to boost productivity among the Sales organization with benefits for Sales Reps, Sales leaders, Revenue Operations, Customer Success, and Marketers. Read the full Press Release here.
RingCentral Announces RingSense, The Conversational Intelligence Solution to Drive Sales Productivity
Analyst Take: As part of their ongoing focus on creating “Intelligent Connected Experiences,” RingSense for Sales is the first in what is expected to be a series of products that mine conversations taking place on the RingCentral platform to understand the interactions and surface relevant insights.
RingSense for Sales provides, among other things, automated note-taking and integration with your Sales force automation tool (Salesforce, Hubspot, Dynamics, and Zoho at launch) to move those notes directly into the seller’s workflow. In addition, RingSense performs sentiment analysis and can score conversations based on custom criteria for follow-up by Sales or other groups in the organization. And, of particular interest is a search function that allows Sales to search through all their conversations for relevant topics or phrases. This last function allows sellers to mine old conversations for leads as new features or capabilities become available.
Sales leaders receive a set of features and capabilities that allow them to coach and manage at scale rather than digging through the specifics of each individual conversation to identify trends. Revenue operations receive insights that can be built directly into deal scoring for better pipeline management. Marketers can identify trending painpoints or buyer objections and more rapidly craft messages or packages to counteract them.
At launch, the RingCentral team expects to have more than 10 integrations with leading productivity, CRM, and authentication products, along with Teams, Zoom, WebEx integration, and RingCentral Video, of course. The integration with other online meeting vendors is an acknowledgment that few organizations operate in a truly heterogeneous environment today, and the value of RingSense can follow a user across all the meeting platforms she may use in the process of getting her work done.
While AI is all the rage at the moment, the capabilities in RingSense have been in the works for some time. RingCentral purchased DeepAffects in late 2020, and Founder Prashant Kukde and his team have continued their work using more than 1 million hours of human interaction in billions of conversations to train 40 million neural network nodes in their proprietary machine-learning models.
RingSense for Sales is expected to be the first in a series of RingSense offerings for various lines of business, departments, or industries.
All of this is a part of RingCentral’s strategic theme of “intelligent connected experiences”. Their intent is to use AI and communications technologies (voice, video, and text) as a foundation for a series of experiences that can be used to connect humans to one another and human conversation to systems. Reducing the friction in the connections will help businesses be more productive, and employees be more satisfied in their work.
Over the course of the last 2 years, the market has increasingly shifted its efforts to sell communications systems to a primary focus on the voice-calling part of the package. This shift certainly plays to RingCentral’s traditional strength, and they have now taken the opportunity to press the advantage to make voice an even more powerful element of the workplace communications stack. By mining human voice interactions for insights and actions and then connecting that data into the workflow, there is a huge amount of lag and jitter removed from our traditional working model of low-res note-taking, reliance on humans to read notes, remembering to take actions, misinterpretation of intent, and so forth. RingSense shortens the distance between creative or productive thought and action for a business, and the amount of productivity that could be gained there seems almost limitless.
Disclosure: Wainhouse Research, part of The Futurum Group family of companies, is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Wainhouse Research as a whole.
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Author Information
Sean is a trusted advisor to and assists industry vendors and enterprises with workplace communications and collaboration strategies, market entry and product assessment, product portfolio analysis, and sales enablement services.
Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from University of Colorado, Boulder.
