Ringio Brings the Cloud-Based Contact Center to SMBs

Contact centers have historically been beyond the reach of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) due to the cost associated with hardware and having enough scale to warrant a contact center operation. The barrier has been somewhat reduced by cloud-based contact centers, but still a contact center is often beyond the reach of the SMB.

Ringio (News - Alert), a cloud-based contact center provider, hopes to change that. It has recently released Ringio Call Center, which it claims in a news release is an affordable and simple cloud-based contact center meant for SMBs. Ringio Call Center enables a company’s inbound and outbound call centers to work together from multiple locations to respond to calls intelligently and quickly.

The company emphasizes the software’s ability to help SMBs create relationships out of each phone opportunity.

“Call centers have hundreds or thousands of daily opportunities to make a positive brand impression.” said Sam Aparicio (News - Alert) in the news release, CEO of Ringio. “With Ringio Call Center, you can empower agents to turn each phone interaction into a relationship building opportunity. When everyone can see who is calling, and gets the right info on their computer screens, there's a magic transformation in people's attitude towards the customer.”

That’s because Ringio Call Center comes with built-in CRM functions. It keeps contacts in sync with Google (News - Alert) Contacts, Salesforce, Highrise or other CRM systems, according to the company’s web site, and it is easy to collaboratively enrich contact information. Organized users help messy users keep good contact records, and the service includes such relationship-building features as LinkedIn, Twitter (News - Alert) and Facebook profiles of the contacts popping up directly from the Ringio Desktop app. This helps the agent know who he or she is talking with.

With the built-in CRM, agents can create notes about conversations with the contact, during and after a phone call. Notes are easy to share, and show up with new incoming calls. Ringio also stores voicemails and lets agents share the phone call history with a contact, so other users can easily connect this phone call with prior conversations.

Ringio Call Center runs as a software-as-a-service, so it can be set up from a computer or mobile device in a matter of minutes. Running in the cloud makes Ringio Call Center a contact center that doesn’t require large up-front costs.

The solution offers a number of features, including a virtual PBX, mobility support, rich call screening, a desktop client, and a REST API that allows companies and third parties to extend the call center’s functionality, in addition to the built-in CRM functionality.

“We are excited to extend the capabilities of the Ringio Technology Platform to support Queuing,” noted Ashish Soni in the news release, CTO for Ringio. “The IVR and smart call queuing seamlessly connect customers or prospects to the call center agents. The virtual automatic call distributor (ACD) routes calls to agents based on their availability and knowledge about the caller.”

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