RingCentral’s NiCE partner extension to benefit local partners

RingCentral has extended its partnership with customer experience software vendor NiCE to provide local partners with several benefits, including larger sales and marketing support. 

The multi-year agreement offers a value proposition for local partners to take to enterprise accounts, largely due to the deep integration between both companies’ unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centre as a service (CCaaS) offerings. 

This extension builds upon the partnership NiCE and RingCentral have cultivated since 2015 and re-energises it in go-to-market, sales, onboarding, and post-sales engagements, helping businesses transform and deliver AI-powered customer experiences. 

RingCentral regional vice president of partner sales Ben Swanson told ARN the AI-powered business communications vendor and NiCE have a long history of mutual commitment and success in the Australian market. 

“Our partners also benefit from the extensive subject matter expertise, and sales and marketing support available to them locally through both NiCE and RingCentral,” he said. 

The joint support comes with NiCE and RingCentral working closely with partners to ensure their customers understand and appreciate the impact that AI can have on their operations and on their business. 

“There are varying levels of understanding out there at the moment on the role that AI can play,” Swanson said. “It’s important that we take the lead in informing the market of AI’s capabilities, and how to deploy it responsibly and effectively. 

“The majority of our AI solutions are delivered out of the box, ensuring [partners] can be delivered effectively as part of our broader UCaaS and CCaaS platforms.” 

According to Swanson, the majority of its Channel Harmony partner program ensures local subject matter experts and sales specialists can take the lead, hand-in-hand with the partner’s sales team.

“We provide post-sales support and follow-up to optimise the deployment of any AI solutions deployed,” he said. “We also provide our partners with extensive training and education, including our Certified Delivery Partner program.” 

Swanson explained that RingCentral is aligned to all key global security and data privacy standards, and our solutions support end-to-end encryption, single sign on with multi factor authentication, and stringent identity and access management controls.  

“Our secure by design approach to product development extends to our integrations with NiCE,” he said. “RingCentral approaches privacy by design by embedding privacy principles across all aspects of our products and services that implement AI, which includes adhering to data sovereignty requirements.” 

However, it is key that customers ensure they spend time on data hygiene and data classification so that only the appropriate data is being exposed and accessed by our AI applications.  

“With our solutions, we take the least permissive posture, which means we restrict all access to data by default, and manage permissions from there,” Swanson said. “We do not use customer data to train our AI models, and we don’t allow our third-party vendors to use our customers’ data to train their AI models.  

“We also provide detailed information to our customers on how AI uses their data, for which purposes and for which outputs.”