We are a small financial services company with about 40 people in our office. We recently upgraded to the Polycom RingCentral phones within our office. However, we deal with a lot of advisors and affiliated companies at other locations who are on their own phone systems. Since the "Company" contacts section of the online management portal only contains people who are on our RingCentral phone system, we had to create a custom "Personal" contaacts list which we import and export as a .csv file.
There are quite a few issues with this process, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to centrally manage these contacts. Any time a change is made to this list, every user must individually import the list again or update the contact on their own terms. When you import a contacts list into your personal contacts, it gives you a few different options. These options are "Overwrite the existing record with the new record" and "Keep current existing record and add new record" and "Keep current and ignore import record"..The only one of these options that works is "keep current and add new record".. The other two bulleted options do not work consistently and I have noticed that when I make changes in the .csv file or the contacts list itself, and then import with one of these options, the changes are not made, or only some of the changes are made.. This means that any time someone wants to append to their current list, they can't. They have to delete the entire list and import it all over again..
Oh wait, there's more...
We deal with companies that have one universal contact number (one main business phone number with each user having their own extensions WITHIN their own phone system).. So, in our contacts list, these people all have the same business number listed.. Apparently, RingCentral contacts can't handle duplicate numbers when it comes to caller ID features, and as far as I can tell, there is no way around this.. Somehow, the caller ID pulls the first user from my personal contacts list that it finds with this number and displays it on the phone each time, regardless of who is calling me from that company. My caller ID could say Bob Smith is calling when in fact Jane Doe is calling me (or one of any other 12 people from that company).. I've tried removing the business phone number and putting it into other fields like "other" or "home phone" for all but one of these users and this does not fix it. I've tried putting these people into a group, and this does not fix it. I've tried adding their additional extensions at the end of the phone number (for example 814-555-8888 * 2222) and this does not work either... There is NO WAY (as far as I can tell) to get the caller ID to display the correct name when dealing with duplicate phone numbers and I just have to accept the fact that people in my office will never know who's truly calling them. This can be quite annoying.. How does it decide which name to choose? It's not alphabetical order..
The Call Log is also inconsistent... If I get a call from Jane Doe, but it pulls John Doe's number and displays his name as the caller ID on the phones screen, the soft phone will still display Jane Doe and then when they leave a voicemail, the voicemail will be from Jane Doe....but yet the phone can't figure out that she's the one calling me?
Also, when our account was created, the main business phone number was associated by default with the person's name who opened the account, so now when our business calls someone, that persons name is listed on their caller ID instead of the business name. We were never told this beforehand nor were we asked what we wanted it to be be listed as... They just went ahead and did it. Fortunately, there is a fix for this, as we would have to assign a new phone number to this person, but that would affect their published number, business cards etc..I have called RingCentral support numerous times about these issues, and nobody I speak with on the phone has any idea about them or how to fix them.
There are quite a few issues with this process, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to centrally manage these contacts. Any time a change is made to this list, every user must individually import the list again or update the contact on their own terms. When you import a contacts list into your personal contacts, it gives you a few different options. These options are "Overwrite the existing record with the new record" and "Keep current existing record and add new record" and "Keep current and ignore import record"..The only one of these options that works is "keep current and add new record".. The other two bulleted options do not work consistently and I have noticed that when I make changes in the .csv file or the contacts list itself, and then import with one of these options, the changes are not made, or only some of the changes are made.. This means that any time someone wants to append to their current list, they can't. They have to delete the entire list and import it all over again..
Oh wait, there's more...
We deal with companies that have one universal contact number (one main business phone number with each user having their own extensions WITHIN their own phone system).. So, in our contacts list, these people all have the same business number listed.. Apparently, RingCentral contacts can't handle duplicate numbers when it comes to caller ID features, and as far as I can tell, there is no way around this.. Somehow, the caller ID pulls the first user from my personal contacts list that it finds with this number and displays it on the phone each time, regardless of who is calling me from that company. My caller ID could say Bob Smith is calling when in fact Jane Doe is calling me (or one of any other 12 people from that company).. I've tried removing the business phone number and putting it into other fields like "other" or "home phone" for all but one of these users and this does not fix it. I've tried putting these people into a group, and this does not fix it. I've tried adding their additional extensions at the end of the phone number (for example 814-555-8888 * 2222) and this does not work either... There is NO WAY (as far as I can tell) to get the caller ID to display the correct name when dealing with duplicate phone numbers and I just have to accept the fact that people in my office will never know who's truly calling them. This can be quite annoying.. How does it decide which name to choose? It's not alphabetical order..
The Call Log is also inconsistent... If I get a call from Jane Doe, but it pulls John Doe's number and displays his name as the caller ID on the phones screen, the soft phone will still display Jane Doe and then when they leave a voicemail, the voicemail will be from Jane Doe....but yet the phone can't figure out that she's the one calling me?
Also, when our account was created, the main business phone number was associated by default with the person's name who opened the account, so now when our business calls someone, that persons name is listed on their caller ID instead of the business name. We were never told this beforehand nor were we asked what we wanted it to be be listed as... They just went ahead and did it. Fortunately, there is a fix for this, as we would have to assign a new phone number to this person, but that would affect their published number, business cards etc..I have called RingCentral support numerous times about these issues, and nobody I speak with on the phone has any idea about them or how to fix them.
