RingCentral AI Receptionist Review: Pricing, Features & UX

What are your options when your call center is experiencing long wait times, burnt out agents, frustrated customers, and a lack of insights?

RingCentral’s AI Receptionist is a new cutting edge AI-powered tool that addresses all of these issues and more. It allows companies to create a completely personalized virtual agent to answer calls, converse with customers in natural language, send texts, answer questions, and route calls.

In the paragraphs below, we’ll take a closer look at what RingCentral’s AI Receptionist is, what benefits it offers, pricing, set up, and more.

• Overview
• Pricing and Plans
• Key Features
• UX and Performance
• Setup and Deployment
• Pros and Cons
• Who Should Use It
• Alternatives
• Final Verdict

What is RingCentral AI Receptionist?

RingCentral’s AI Receptionist is an add-on virtual receptionist that can answer calls, answer common questions, route calls to the appropriate department or agent, and even send text messages to callers. It integrates with the RingCentral phone system and is powered by artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and business intelligence.

AI Receptionists understand and speak in natural language, and can handle multiple calls at a time, making it a great tool for high volume call centers that need to reduce hold times and lessen strain on human agents.

Pricing and Plans

RingCentral’s AI Receptionist can be added onto any plan for $59 per account, per month and includes 100 minutes. RingCentral also offers a 14-day free trial of the feature. RingCentral UCaaS plans range from $20-$35 monthly per user when paid annually. CCaaS plans start at $65 monthly, per user.

For more information, please see our RingCentral pricing guide.

Key Features of RingCentral AI Receptionist

RingCentral AI Receptionist can do everything a human agent can do, and it does so faster and with more consistency. Here are some of the standout features included with an AI Receptionist subscription.

Intelligent Routing

AI Receptionist can comprehend natural language, and uses key words and phrases to determine where a call should be routed, such as the billing or service department. Callers can ask to be routed to a specific person or location, and the AI Receptionist will do so.

Companies customize routing within a department, such as using longest idle time or round robin methods. Admins create after-hours, business hours, and vacation routing rules.

Answer FAQs

For businesses that receive a lot of callers asking the same questions, the AI Receptionist will have a large impact on hold times. AI Receptionist is able to answer common questions that admins train it on, such as operating hours or what items are in stock.

AI Receptionist can also access information from the company knowledge base, training materials, and the internet in order to answer simple queries. Because Receptionist AI understands natural language, it can answer a question no matter how the caller asks it.

Custom Greetings

Companies instruct the AI Receptionist on how to greet callers, choosing not only what the AI Receptionist will say, but the tone used. Admins can set different greetings for business and after hours calls. This is a great way to ensure that the brand's voice and values shine through on every call.

Automated Text Messaging

AI receptionist is able to send SMS text messages to customers such as appointment times, links for intake or feedback forms, follow-ups, etc. This allows companies to send information to customers faster with fewer errors.

Customizable AI Personna

RingCentral’s AI Receptionist is extremely customizable. For the AI persona, admins can control the voice, language, tone, and specific knowledge that the AI will use to answer questions. Admins can preview different voice options in the Admin portal such as professional, friendly, or energetic.

Spam Blocking

AI Receptionist automatically blocks SPAM calls using a variety of detection methods such as STIR/SHAKEN authentication, machine learning, and custom user settings.

User Experience and Performance

AI Receptionist users find the feature to be easy to set up with a user-friendly interface. It performs well with natural speech patterns and a high level of accuracy.

Call Quality and Accuracy

AI Receptionist offers a higher call quality than many other UCaaS competitors thanks to RingCentral’s multiple global points of presence, redundancy, and 99.999% uptime SLA. The accuracy of the Receptionist's answers varies based on how much information and data it has access to. The more data that it is “trained on”, the more accurate it will be. That being said, AI Receptionist may struggle to answer more complex questions from callers.

Conversational Flow and NLP Capabilities

AI Receptionist’s NLP capabilities are advanced, with the ability to understand context and respond appropriately. The AI Receptionist also speeds up and slows down at appropriate times in order to mimic a natural language cadence.

Customization and Training Options

Receptionist AI offers many customization options, such as custom routing rules and custom content to be provided to customers in reminders, confirmations, greetings, etc. Companies can also choose a voice and persona for AI Receptionist, and can control what knowledge AI Receptionist has access to.

Monitoring and Analytics

AI Receptionist captures and records all conversations with transcripts and analytics so that its effectiveness can be closely monitored. AI Receptionist improves over time as it gathers more data, and administrators can speed up this process by monitoring transcripts and adding guidelines and rules for the feature.

Setup and Deployment

Setting up RingCentral’s AI Receptionist does not require any code and is generally quite fast. It integrates seamlessly with RingCentral’s UCaaS or CCaaS platform so it will automatically have access to things like contact lists.

To set up the tool, you start by logging into the admin portal, then you navigate to the AI tab, select AI Receptionist and click “create new”. You will first be asked to select an AI personality and voice, then you will be asked to provide a website URL and company description for the AI to reference when answering FAQs. After that you just need to create a custom greeting and set up routing rules.

Pros and Cons You Should Know

RingCentral's AI Receptionist has many advanced features and is very reliable and secure, but it's also pricey and may not be necessary for every business. Here are some pros and cons you should know:

Who Should Use RingCentral AI Receptionist?

Any company that receives a high volume of calls each day can benefit from RingCentral’s AI Receptionist. It is especially helpful for service teams that are struggling with long wait times. Other businesses that will benefit include:

• Healthcare industry: Teams in the healthcare industry will benefit from RingCentral’s HIPAA-compliant platform, and AI Receptionist can be used to automate appointment scheduling and reminders
• Law offices: Legal professionals can use AI Receptionist to answer common questions and take down information from potential clients so no one falls into the cracks
• Large enterprises: RingCentral offers a high level of security and reliability along with many cutting edge features. AI receptionist comes with a high cost but it allows larger companies to reduce wait times, provide better service, and cut down on staff
• High volume call centers: RingCentral AI can be used in high volume call centers to screen calls and route them to the right agent while providing powerful insights

How It Compares Against Competitors

RingCentral is not the only UCaaS provider to offer an AI Receptionist, but it is one of the most robust on the market. Here are some other cloud communications providers that offer an AI Receptionist.

Final Verdict

RingCentral’s AI Receptionist is a cutting edge tool that offers a lot of potential, particularly for high volume enterprises. That said, it does come at a cost. It must be purchased as an add on to a RingCentral UCaaS or CCaaS plan, and if minutes go beyond 100 per month, overage charges may apply. It may be worth it, however, if it leads to higher productivity, happier customers, more conversions, and lower wait times.