Video Transcription
Chris Frey:
I want to shift gears here and talk about change. Change is a fun topic. With any time you move from point A to point B, there's some change along the way and it's not always fun, it's not always enjoyable but we really want to point out those areas, point out those potholes. Let customers try to find ways around them. Again, with your perspective being a customer and also working for both manufacturers, I'd like to get some insight from you on some of that change.
Garry Simpson:
Sure.
Chris Frey:
I'm going to lead you with a few of these so you can go into them. The first one is, can you talk a little bit about the change people might expect between in the past they had Communicator and then together with their ShoreTel desk phone and those two things were a match made in heaven and they worked together really well. How might that change in a RingCentral environment?
Garry Simpson:
Yeah. It's a good point because some of these things, the earlier you know about them, the better you can deal with change because change is inevitable, it's going to happen. The question is, how do I manage that with my users? Moving into the cloud, especially with RingCentral in particular, the desk phone and the client do act differently and it would probably be the case no matter what you did and where you move to.
Those things are always going to be a little different. I think one of the things, especially if you're coming from the ShoreTel world is that tight integration between those two is a little different in the cloud because now in the cloud we're supporting endpoints of many different flavors. It doesn't just have to be one particular physical phone. It could be many different physical phones from many different providers and we've got to be able to interact with all of them.
I think it is important to coach users and get them prepped and get them understanding those differences between those two things and how they work. Obviously a desk phone is still a desk phone, you can pick it up, get dial tone, make a phone call. Software, obviously you can do the same thing. How those two interact and what they do together might be a little different and the nuances of which buttons you press to get things to happen are obviously going to be different as well.
Your point as well taken. I think that's one of the first places for people to really get aware of, and if you're going to do any kind of POC or any kind of testing of the system, it's probably a good idea to get people in front of the hard phone, in front of the software, in front of the mobile app, to make sure that they're comfortable with it and that they understand how it works and what those differences are so they can head those off as they start to get to the wider user base.
Chris Frey:
Can I control my desk phone with the desktop app in RingCentral? Because in ShoreTel, Mitel, there's call control that exists between those two.
Garry Simpson:
Yeah. The-
Chris Frey:
Is that the same in Ring?
Garry Simpson:
No. It's a little different. Again, because the software might have two, three, four, five different phones from different manufacturers, to be quite frank we're always dealing with lowest common denominator. What is it that we can universally address across all those phones? I can send a call that comes from my software to a desk phone, which is much like what you used to be able to do with ShoreTel Communicator and the desk phone.
The real difference becomes with the nuances of what can I do once that call's been established? With ShoreTel, you had pretty much complete call control. You could actually put the call on hold, you could transfer the call, you could mute the call, you could do a lot of things from the software and yet still control your physical phone to do that. With ShoreTel it's... Sorry, with RingCentral it's a little different.
We can, as I said, send that call to the phone, but there isn't as much detail in the quality of the control that we have once the call's on that remote device. Like we were talking about with change, that's one of those things to get people comfortable with. If they've done that a lot, you want to show them, "Okay. With this new world, here's what you can do." It's not to say that you're going to be losing capabilities.
It's really just that it's going to be a different interaction or you might be leaning on the software more or the mobile app more because the functionality is very rich there. Rather than sending a call from my software to my desk phone, that mode of operation may not be the way that you work going forward. It was the way that we worked before, but with COVID, a lot of people learned to work a new way with softphones, mobile phones and all of that.