RingCentral and Verint have partnered to integrate Verint’s AI-powered workforce engagement management and CX automation products with RingCentral’s RingCX platform. This collaboration aims to enhance RingCentral customers’ contact center interactions and improve operational efficiency by using AI bots injected into workflows.

AI is increasingly critical in customer engagement solutions as businesses face pressure to meet customer expectations for personalized and efficient experiences. RingCentral’s offerings are designed to enhance customer support, increase productivity and reduce costs. RingCentral founder, chairman and CEO Vlad Shmunis said the integration with Verint is a “key component of delivering a complete customer experience platform” for RingCentral. Shmunis noted his company’s strong market traction and said that he sees the partnership as an opportunity to “further enhance the value proposition of RingCX in the mid-sized and enterprise segments.”

What Do Verint Bots Do?

Verint’s AI-powered bots are part of the Da Vinci AI and Analytics solution and are designed to automate routine tasks and support customer interactions across multiple channels. These bots use natural language processing and machine learning to respond to customer inquiries in various channels, including voice, chat, e-mail, and social media; this helps companies provide consistent responses across different platforms.

Each bot performs one specific task and is injected directly into workflows. Contact centers can use bots for individual tasks or layer them to weave together multiple workflows. Each bot is tied to an outcome and incorporates specific features, including contextual understanding and escalation capabilities. Bots can interpret customer intent and sentiment, which enables them to provide responses that align with the customer’s needs. If a query is too complex, the bots can transfer the interaction to a human agent and supply relevant context for a smooth handoff. Through machine learning, Verint bots adapt and refine their responses over time, learning from each interaction to improve performance.

Key Applications Of The RingCentral/Verint Partnership

Based on what the companies have said about this partnership and my own background in enterprise software and HRM tools, I see several areas where the newly combined capabilities could be useful for customers. These include:

• Workforce Engagement Management — Verint’s extensive suite of bots includes tools for quality management, interaction analytics, forecasting and scheduling. Quality management features could be used to automatically score agent interactions based on predefined criteria, helping identify top performers and areas for improvement. Interaction analytics can help detect trends in customer inquiries, allowing managers to address recurring customer issues proactively. One of my favorite Verint WEM bots is the TimeFlex Bot, which gives contact center agents unlimited flexibility for schedule changes without going through approvals.
• AI Automation — Routine administrative tasks such as updating customer profiles or processing simple refund requests can be automated, reducing the burden on human agents. In many cases, AI can also categorize and route inquiries to the appropriate department or agent based on message content. Verint’s Interaction Wrap-Up Bot, for example, can handle post-call summarization, freeing up agents to focus on more complex tasks.
• Intelligent Virtual Agents — Verint’s IVA, powered by its Digital and Voice Containment Bots, could handle basic account inquiries, such as reviewing balances or recent transactions, without involving a human agent. Customers could also use an IVA to schedule appointments or make reservations outside regular business hours. For e-commerce businesses, an IVA could guide customers through the steps to track an order or initiate a return.
• Knowledge Management — Verint’s Knowledge Automation Bot could help customer service agents quickly access a centralized knowledge base during customer calls, potentially improving response times and accuracy. Using a single search bar, agents could instantly access information across multiple knowledge sources, reducing or eliminating the need for multiple time-consuming searches. The bot can then use generative AI to analyze and summarize search results, delivering a single, concise answer curated explicitly for the contact center environment.

The Bot(tom) Line

The success of this partnership will depend on several factors, including ease of integration and demonstrable improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. Successfully integrating AI often requires significant changes to workflows and processes. While AI adoption is increasing rapidly, many organizations are still in the early stages of implementation and may lack the expertise to get the most out of their AI investments. A recent survey by IBM found that only 35% of companies currently use AI in their business operations, while another 42% are actively exploring its potential. This suggests that the widespread adoption of AI will require organizational change management, AI skills development and a principled approach to addressing concerns about data security and ethical implications.