Vonage Vs. Ring Central – When Searching for VoIP for Large Businesses, Which Delivers Greater ROI?

Leaders of big companies are looking every day for ways to make their employees more efficient. To accomplish this task, communication and collaboration tools are leveraged heavily. One of the most transformative communication and collaboration developments has been the use of VoIP deployed across an entire organization. In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons that big business is moving toward VoIP phones and the pros and cons that two giants in the virtual phone market (Vonage and Ring Central) bring to the table.

What is Enterprise VoIP Phone?

A VoIP phone is a business phone system for enterprise-level corporations that runs on the newer internet infrastructure instead of the outdated landline system. The main advantages of VoIP phone technology are:

• Scalability – add or remove users as your corporation grows or goes through hire/layoff cycles
• Flexibility – allow employees the flexibility of making calls from a desk phone or smartphone with the same professional telephone presence and features
• Cost-Effectiveness – use new technology to avoid the high cost of repairing and maintaining outdated landline-based systems

The best VoIP systems for enterprise have all the features that you would expect in a business phone plus additional features such as video calls that are not available in the older systems.

Why Are Big Businesses Leveraging VoIP for Enterprise?

• Customer Service – Large organizations choose VoIP because it gives the professional presence and the customer call-in experience they are seeking to provide.
• Tailored Branding – Because of the many ways to customize the call-in experience on VoIP for enterprise setups, a corporation can define and tweak its telephone presence branding at a granular level.
• Analytics – By examining the data from call logs, business administrators can improve customer experience and make decisions that drive employee efficiency.
• Redundancy and Business Continuity – The best VoIP systems for big businesses provide a corporation with the backup system needed to keep internal processes running in the case of a localized disaster that negatively impacts their in-house telecommunications assets.
• Easy Provisioning – Enterprise-level organizations are constantly assigning business phones to new employees. The capacity to easily provide fully functional business phone access to an employee from a single online dashboard is attractive and saves time and money. Conversely, it’s just as simple to revoke the telephone rights of an employee that is leaving or has been fired.

What Features Are Attractive to Corporate Leadership?

• Cost-effective long-distance calling
• Integrations for line of business applications
• Polished, professional telephone experience for callers at every stage of the call
• Granular customization at both the organizational and phone user levels
• Easily budgeted monthly subscription payments that are all-inclusive

When Considering VoIP for Big Business What’s Better? Vonage Vs. Ring Central

In the race to win your telecommunications dollars, Vonage and Ring Central are two of the major players. While each VoIP provider claims to be better than the next, they are generally the same product and offer many of the same features. While 80% of what they do to give you VoIP communications and collaboration are the same, it’s the 20% difference between the two services that will make them a good or poor choice for your big business. Let’s look at these differences.

Vonage

Vonage offers over forty phone features in their Vonage Business Cloud offering. Their pricing options range from their “Mobile” package priced at $19.99 per seat to their “Advanced” package at $39.99 per seat. The differences between these three business phone packages center around the more complex, but rewarding, features: Multi-level Auto Attendant, Video Conferencing, Chat, File Sharing CRM Integrations, Call Recording, Visual Voicemail, and Included Setup.

Vonage is leading in user-friendly softphone apps. Their apps have been re-designed to be more feature-rich and to integrate with a number of other software solutions via APIs. On the backend, Vonage has put together a control panel that allows for granular control of the entire business telephone system, delivering the ability to customize a big company’s telephone experience for maximum benefit.

Vonage is one of the best VoIP for big business, supplying large organizations with transformative communications and collaboration technology. Some of the selling features of Vonage VoIP systems are:

• Video Conferencing
• Round-the-clock help desk support
• Business application integrations
• Scalable services
• Near-zero downtime
• Speed from modern internet infrastructure
• More than 40 pro-business telephone features
• Softphone applications for Android and iOS

One interesting partnership that Vonage has forged is with Amazon. Vonage is now offering Amazon Chime (Amazon’s new video/voice communications service) within the Vonage Business Cloud solution.

The downside for Vonage clients falls into two buckets. There is a level of dissatisfaction with their help desk ticketing system, and like all VoIP systems, Vonage systems and the integrated software needs to be secured by a cybersecurity professional to ensure that the virtual phone system doesn’t become a vulnerability.

Ring Central

When it comes to VoIP for enterprise, Ring Central’s offering is called RingCentral Office. RingCentral Office pricing ranges from $19.99 per month per seat up to $49.99 per month per seat. The differences between the four packages that Ring Central offers lies in the inclusion of a toll-free number, the number of toll-free minutes included, call recording, voicemail to text, and a few other higher-end features.

Ring Central is particularly attractive to big businesses that have employees working in satellite offices in Europe and Asia. Ring Central has put a lot of work and money into building out its infrastructure in these regions of the world so it can offer its services there as well.

Ring Central is currently one of the industry leaders providing VoIP for big business. This is in part due to the following facts.

• Simple implementation for business
• Mobile softphone applications for iPhone and Android
• Comprehensive offering of more than 50 professional telephone features
• Stable monthly subscription payment model
• Useful in supporting business continuity strategies
• Provision remote employees and satellite offices with the company telephone system
• Scale up or down for company growth or business hire/layoff cycles
• Call center available to help with setup and troubleshooting

One of the things that sets Ring Central apart from Vonage at this point is the fact that Ring Central has taken a step into the AI world. AI integrations allow companies using Ring Central to leverage voice analytics. To accomplish this, Ring Central has partnered with Gong.io, ThetaLake, and Velvetech.

The downside to RingCentral Office is that the application and integration wizards are not quite as intuitive as those offered by its competitor Vonage.

What Should I Choose? Vonage Vs. Ring Central – What is the Best VoIP for Big Businesses?

Vonage and Ring Central, like all VoIP providers, have their upsides and downfalls. When surveying the verified reviews of each offering, the common complaint across the board was the public’s disappointment with each company’s level of customer service. Having said this, there is no VoIP telephone company out there playing on this level that doesn’t have its fair share of critics.

When it comes down to a decision between Vonage or Ring Central, the choice has to be made on the following considerations.

• Your needs in comparison to the feature set that works within your budget
• The ease of use of the back end of their system
• The service area coverage that is offered by the VoIP provider
• The user-friendly nature of the softphone virtual phone apps offered