We have been a customer with Ring Central (RC) since May 2019 and have had several issues with them - too many for the one year of service that we have received so far. See below for a list of issues and how they were handled by RC. RC needs to improve their communication with their customers!
1. Most Recent Issue. In late May 2020, we had an issue where multiple recorded meetings were not uploaded to the RC cloud. Our President, Mr. Ravid recorded the meetings around 9 a.m. and waited for a few hours to receive the link to download. The link never came through and after checking our portal, we see that the meetings do not seem to be processing at all.
2:30 p.m., Saturday, May 20, 2020
o We called support around 2:30 p.m. We had to call three times before we could get connected to someone. Twice, we were connected, but then the call was somehow disconnected, and we did not receive a call back even though the RC rep had our number. Finally, we reached Joshua Azuero, an RC Tier 1 Customer Service Rep. Joshua was so patient and helpful. He took the time to really try and fix our issue or at least get answers for us in real time. After being on the phone with him for more than two hours and running some tests, Joshua confirmed Mr. Ravid went through the correct steps to record a meeting to the cloud, but for some reason the meetings were lost. Thus, there was no solution to be provided at the time. Joshua escalated the issue to Tier 2 support and told us we would receive a call within 24 hours. We received a service ticket from them at 9:30 p.m.
12:00 p.m., Sunday, May 31, 2020
o Please note, RC provides 24/7 Customer Support according to their website. We called again at 12 p.m. to get a status update and reached a rep not in Tier 2 support. We have a 2:00 p.m. Pacific U.S. deadline on Monday to receive the recordings, so he was trying to get ANYONE from Tier 2 support to help us. But, again, we lost connection and the rep did not call us back even though he had our call-back number. We were also told no one had started working on the issue and that someone from Advanced Support would call us before they start working on it.
10 a.m., Monday, June 1, 2020
o We have a deadline at 2 p.m. to download those recorded meetings so we could edit and send them out as part of a webinar. We still have not heard anything from RC. At 10 a.m., I call our current Account Manager, Tim Underwood, to explain what is going on and that we have not heard from anyone. Tim was helpful and prompt with his responses. He gives me a call back at 11 a.m. and tells me he escalated the issue to the reps managers and another department as well and we should a expect a call from them that day. Around 2 p.m., Tim calls to let me know that the advanced support reps are finally working on it. However, we never received the call from Advanced Support like we were told the day before. Also, we had to bring in our account manager to push the support team.
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
o NO RESPONSE. We missed our deadline and decide to wait a few more hours. Still nothing, so we decide to re-record our meetings and save the recordings to the computer instead of the cloud.
8:50 a.m., Wednesday, June 3, 2020
o We received our first real response from Al Lennon, a Tier 3 Engineer. We were informed someone found the issue and was finally working on it. Al confirms that there is an issue with the Zoom platform that RC uses for the meetings. By this time, we had already re-recorded our meetings/videos.
12:00 p.m., Thursday, June 4, 2020
o It is now Thursday afternoon - RC has not solved the issue. Fortunately, Al is being helpful in providing status updates. The RC engineers are now working with the Zoom engineers to fix the issue.
9:45 a.m., Friday, June 5, 2020
o Al informs us that the Zoom engineers do not believe the link to download meetings from the 30th can be fixed. They are going to try to get the actual recorded files from our meetings on the 30th and provide them to us manually. However, it will be of no use to us if we cannot download the meetings.
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
o We never received a follow up and we dont know if the case is still open or if they ended up closing it.
We desperately needed to download these meetings and our issue kept getting tossed around from tier to tier and rep to rep. There were three instances where we were on the phone with a rep and the call was disconnected on their end. Support ALWAYS asks you to confirm a call back number and has the account phone number information available to them, but no one bothered to call us back each time. Joshua was the only rep that tried to have our issue resolved in real time, but he could not provide a solution. Our Account Manager, Tim, provided support when no one was responding and informed us that the issue still hadnt been looked into when the week started. We should not have to bring in our Account Manager every time we have an issue. Support should be responsive and provide status updates to their customers. Lastly, Al was helpful in providing daily updates, but by then we had already re-recorded our videos. Id like to also add that a similar issue had happened before where our meetings were stuck in processing in the cloud recording management section of our portal. EVENTUALLY, the meetings uploaded, but not after going through multiple tiers of support like I just mentioned. Both issues have been related to the Zoom platform that RC uses, according to support. Thus, their services cannot be relied on.
2. Basic services are not available. I first contacted RC support in 2019 asking for a basic feature of being able to sync personal contacts to the physical desk phone. After being on the phone with them for almost an hour, the rep told me that there was no solution and that I should make a feature request in the RC community forum. I go do that and realize that this had been brought up to RC 5 YEARS AGO by another user and several other users had already expressed their support for this feature. Even the customer service rep I had spoken to about this said that it should be a feature. It seems like RC does not listen to their customers requests for BASIC services/features.
3. Account Managers. We were new customers to RC in May 2019 and since then, we have had around four different account managers who did not notify us when the switch to a new Account Manager had occurred. There is ZERO communication to the customer. Whenever we needed their support, we were stuck playing catch up and having to inform them of a problem the last Account Manager was supposed to be fixing (see Contracts below for an example). It seems like this is a pattern RC has. They switch account managers regularly instead of solving the issues already presented to them. Also, they tend not to follow up on emails. Note, our current Account Manager, Tim, has been great communicating with us. We had to go through three account managers to get there.
4. Contracts. All features in our contract were not being honored when we began using RC. Our contract clearly stated under SPECIAL TERMS AND NOTES: 100 people per meeting. When we first started using our meetings, one of our users was not able to join a meeting because 4 people were already in the meeting. Our account manager at the time, Chris Villanueva, supposedly fixed the issue. A few months later, when we started working from home due to COVID-19, the same thing happened again. This was the worst possible time for this to happen and RCs response to this issue for a SECOND time is not acceptable. This time, we had a new account manager, Patrick Quinn, who had to apologize to us on behalf of the last one for not fixing the issue the correct way.
5. Lack of Communication. There is a constant lack of communication from RC. The amount of time between any response takes hours, even DAYS. When we do get a response, we explain the issue and are told we will receive a call back from a Tier 2 support person. When we do receive that call (hours later), again we are stuck playing catch up with the rep and are needing to explain everything that is going on. Shouldnt there be notes on this from the first call?
It is unclear what support means for this company. For most companies when customers reach out to their support, they have an immediate need. RC does not seem to have any interest in resolving issues in a timely manner or even communicating in a timely manner. Instead, they escalate the issues and hope that someone else will take care of it. There is no communication, no follow up, and no accountability.
