Welcome back to our provider spotlight series. Today, we set our sights high and talk to one of the biggest names in business VoIP today—RingCentral. RingCentral breaths rarefied air as one of the top cloud VoIP providers, giving service to some of the biggest businesses, including Yahoo!, Jackson Hewitt, and Coursera. Since their founding in 2003, they have amassed over 300,000 customers, and won countless awards from top review sites, and industry researchers.

Today, we talk one-on-one with Jose Pastor, the VP of product for RingCentral. As the the team leader in Product Management and Design, it’s his job to think of ways how he can make RingCentral better and more enjoyable for customers. You have him to thank for any recent changes in the platform that made it easier to use or gave you a new feature you never knew you needed but now you couldn’t live without.

The first thing you might notice about this video is the way its produced. That isn’t our editor, that’s RingCentral’s own Zoom-based web conference software. As you’ll see, it automatically detects who is talking and shifts the focus of the video to the active speaker. With RingCentral Meetings users can chat, screen-share, and file-share. Like every RingCentral product, it will work whether you like Apple, Android, or PCs.

Join us as we pick Jose’s brain to find out why RingCentral would be the best choice for your business, and get an idea what your experience will be like with RingCentral when you choose them for your cloud-based phone service. Here’s our Q&A with Jose:

How long have you been with RingCentral, and what exactly do you do there?

I’ve been at RingCentral for about 3 and a half years through a variety of product roles, and today, as you mentioned, I’m the Vice President of Product. And what that means, is that I lead product roadmap and strategy for our core offerings, which includes everything from design, what features, and how we deliver them to our customers.

Where does RingCentral currently offer service?

We’re proud to offer services in North America, primarily US and CA, as well as UK, and Singapore. I will say that we also offer services to our customers in more that 30 countries throughout the world.

Who is RingCentral’s ideal customer, is it the SMB, Mid-size, or Enterprise?

One of the great things about RingCentral is that we bring enterprise class reliability and functionality to companies of all sizes including the very small and mid-size companies.

Our carrier grade systems include industry leading usability that’s suitable for companies of all sizes, from very small all the way to the enterprise. A large and growing portion of our 300k business, is in that SMB space. It’s part of our history, and we’re committed to serving that market very well.

What differentiates RingCentral from your competitors?

Reliability, availability, and quality of service are paramount. Service where you need it, just like dial tone, whenever you want to pick up the phone and make a call. And you can hear that clarity whether you pick up on the receiver on your desk, or if you’re at a coffee shop talking on a mobile phone using the RingCentral app, or in a specialized case like on a softphone on a computer.

Second – usability, we listen to our customers. And we spend everyday on how to make the product better and more enjoyable for people to use everyday. We drive at making communications more effective and usability as a product is critical there.

Third – functionality. There are a lot of people that use a phone system in an office, but there’s one group in particularly that’s really important. The IT role, plays such a critical role in choosing, running, and maintaining the systems, and we want to make the system not only easy to administer, but rich in functionality so they have the control they need to set up call flows the way the need them, and meet their business needs in terms of security and reliability.

What differentiates RingCentral’s customer support from your competitors?

A great product just works, and so you don’t need a lot of support, and that’s one of the things we work on day in and day out across my team. It’s something we’re very proud of. Having said that, great support starts from the beginning, from when a buyer is engaging with the sales rep, having them set the right expectation, to dedicated implementation staff who work with customers to understand their business needs, and get the system set up correctly right from the get go. And we back them up a with world class support organization that runs 24/7.

In fact, as a point of reference, we were recently named a Bronze Award Winner in that Customer Service Team of the year category by the American Business Awards Ceremony, so it’s not just that we’re committed internally, we’re also being recognized externally for that three tiered approach.

And we don’t stop there, we go one step further, we use an industry leading approach call NPS (Net Promoter Score), where we actively measure customer satisfaction. We have dedicated resources to continuously improve the customer experience.

Can you explain RingCentral’s pricing model for a 5 user system on your most popular service?

By the way, our most popular product is RingCentral Office, and we drive for simplicity. In the SMB space there’s a lot of value in having a system that just works and it’s predictable in both it’s pricing model, and it’s usage. It’s all on the website, we’re very transparent.

Office comes in three editions, with varying functionality ranging in price from $24.99 to $44.99 per user. And the plans are all inclusive, so you’ll never get caught in nickel and dimes. So figuring our what your costs are is taking your number of users, and matching up the functionality that you need and doing a little straight arithmetic.

What is RingCentral’s most popular/unique feature?

So just a couple of weeks ago, I was traveling for work and had a long layover. The thing I found so helpful is that my RingCentral mobile app, on my iPhone, had my business extension right in my pocket, I never missed a beat. I was sending and receiving SMS, I never missed a call, I was able to really use my business identity, business phone number, right there from the airport lobby.

And when you think about unique features, mobile is really great, and will allow you to work from anywhere. Whether its the phone on your desk, or when you’re out and about.

Where do you see RingCentral in 12 months?

The biggest area of growth we see is really in integrating RingCentral Office with the applications people choose to work with. Whether that’s Google for Work, Zoho, Salesforce, or Office 365, so that they can see everything right and live.

What are you most proud of about RingCentral today?

I love that we’re working to make business communications more effective and more enjoyable so that our customers can focus on what they do best, and run their business.

Is there anything you’d like to add as a must know about RC to potential customers?

We believe in delivering exceptional value, providing industry leading usability, so you can actually get access to that value, so you don’t have to spend all your time figuring it out and rather just use it, and providing a flexible system, so that You, the customer, can work the way that you want to.