RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), the global leader in AI-powered business communications, today announced innovations designed to help organizations deliver reliable, always-on customer engagement. New features include Rich Communication Services (RCS) with branded messaging, enterprise branded calling, international SMS enhancements, Customer Engagement Bundle (CEB) for Microsoft Teams, and Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams. Additionally, RingCentral has extended AI Receptionist (AIR) to shared SMS inboxes and call queues, enabling real-time automated engagement to ensure no customer inquiries are missed.
New RCS and brand messaging
RingCentral now offers branded messaging through RCS, a big step up from sending standard SMS. RCS enables businesses to deliver a rich branded messaging experience within recipients’ native messaging apps, without downloading, using a verified business ID rather than plain text from an unrecognized number. RCS moves business messaging beyond one-way communication and enables more dynamic and responsive customer interactions.
Brand Messaging is the first step in RingCentral’s RCS deployment. This feature allows businesses to present a verified, recognizable identity in every message with logos, brand names, and taglines that appear directly within the thread. Subsequent phases will add high-quality media, interactive carousels, and one-tap reply options, allowing businesses to move from simple verified messages to a fully rich conversation experience. Whether sending appointment reminders, service alerts, or promotions, businesses use branded messaging to increase engagement and drive customer awareness at scale. Let’s start here.
“RCS adoption is growing rapidly and offers similar formats and functionality to popular over-the-top applications. For example, approximately 75% of smartphone users in the United States are RCS-enabled. All major carriers and devices support RCS, but most B2C messages remain plain old SMS text,” said Dave Michels, Principal and Lead Analyst at TalkingPointz. “RingCentral is one of the first wave of major CCaaS providers to support RCS natively, resulting in higher reliability and engagement.”
enterprise branded calls
Launched last year, RingCentral also offers Enterprise Branded Calling, designed to help businesses overcome the growing challenge of unanswered calls. Businesses using RingCentral can display their company name and logo when making outgoing calls, allowing customers to instantly know who is calling and why, leading to higher response rates and more productive conversations from the moment of initial contact.
The combination of branded messaging and enterprise branded calling provides businesses with a consistent, verified brand presence across both messaging and voice, ensuring that every customer interaction begins with recognition and trust.
“Like many healthcare organizations, we saw our patient callback rates drop significantly as people became more hesitant to answer unknown numbers,” said Eric Brosius, vice president of technical services at Sun River Health. “Enterprise Branded Calling helps cut through that noise by clearly identifying calls with the Sun River Health name and logo. We expect this to dramatically improve our ability to reach patients for appointment reminders, test results, and other important communications.”
International SMS expansion
RingCentral is expanding global messaging with SMS in the UK and Australia, enabling organizations to extend customer engagement beyond the US with reliable communications that reach intended recipients. Easily integrate with your mobile phone number, giving your customers a trusted business number or direct dial to seamlessly engage with them via voice and SMS.
Additionally, RingCentral now supports SMS notifications across 190 countries using alphanumeric sender IDs. Through intelligent routing, message fallback capabilities, and strategic carrier partnerships, International SMS delivers an average delivery rate of 98%, maximizing the reach of mission-critical notifications, updates, and marketing campaigns to international businesses.
Ashu Varshney, Senior Vice President of RingEX Products at RingCentral, said: “In an era of rising spam, the way consumers decide whether to answer a phone call or open a text message is fundamentally changing, making brand awareness and trust essential in everyday communications.”
RingCentral AI Receptionist™ (AIR) for shared SMS inboxes and call queues
RingCentral extends AI Receptionist (AIR) to a cross-channel automation layer across both voice and SMS, bringing AI-powered automation to every customer conversation.
While we’ve focused on voice so far, AIR is now extending to SMS inboxes, allowing businesses to automatically respond to customer inquiries through messaging. By interpreting intent and maintaining context across channels, AIR delivers accurate responses in real-time based on approved business knowledge, delivering a unified, always-on experience, whether your customers call or text.
AIR also integrates with call queues to handle overflow and missed calls, intervening when agents are unavailable or have long wait times. This allows customers to receive immediate responses without being put on hold or abandoning the interaction, while also capturing important details for follow-up.
The main features are:
– Automate responses both by voice and SMS
– Interpret customer intent and maintain context across channels
– Instantly respond to routine inquiries and reduce response times
– Manage call overflow and missed interactions with AI-powered responses
– Understand customer needs in real time for faster, more informed follow-up
– Provides always-on engagement during peak demand or outside business hours
By extending AI to messaging and call handling, organizations can reduce missed interactions, improve responsiveness, and deliver consistent, high-quality service without increasing operational overhead.
“Customers currently face significant challenges with their existing unified communications & collaboration stacks and customer engagement platforms, including integration complexity and lack of unified data and analytics. These issues create inefficiencies, prevent seamless communication, and negatively impact the customer experience,” said Prachi Nema, Principal Analyst, Unified Communications & Collaboration, Omdia. “Leveraging a comprehensive platform suite and powered by AIR’s advanced capabilities, RingCentral is designed to address exactly these types of pain points.”
Customer Engagement Bundle (CEB) for Microsoft Teams
RingCentral’s Customer Engagement Bundle (CEB) for Microsoft Teams natively integrates voice, SMS, intelligent call routing, and AI-powered insights within Teams, transforming the platform your employees already use into a lightweight contact center. All interactions are processed, tracked, and analyzed without leaving Teams.
The main features are:
– Voice and SMS conversations are managed natively within Microsoft Teams
– Call routing with waiting time announcements, queue positioning, and callback options
– Shared SMS inbox and call workflow for cross-team coordination
– Post-call summaries and insights within Microsoft Teams
– Gain real-time and historical visibility into customer interactions with comprehensive tracking of activity, performance, and team effectiveness.
“Most organizations don’t lack tools; they struggle with disconnected systems that break the customer experience,” said Mira D’Antonio, Principal Analyst of Customer Engagement at Omdia. “RingCentral’s Customer Engagement Bundle for Teams reduces complexity and speeds time to value by embedding customer interactions directly into the platforms your employees already work on.”
At Brain Health USA, this unified approach has improved responsiveness in high-stakes patient communications. “The RingCentral Customer Engagement Bundle gives Brain Health USA medical staff the ability to manage patient outreach and emergency calls with greater visibility, eliminating the need to keep patients waiting at critical moments,” said Andrew Shenoda, IT Manager at Brain Health USA. “By leveraging these AI-driven tools, we can reduce time on administrative tasks by 40% and gain more than three times the insight into communication patterns, allowing us to focus on mental health outcomes.”
Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams
RingCentral further extends this experience with Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams, delivering global calling natively within your Teams environment. With coverage across 46 countries, integrated messaging and AI capabilities, and centralized provisioning through the Teams admin center, organizations can simplify telephony, integrate providers, and deploy calls in minutes. All of this is backed by RingCentral’s 99.999% uptime reliability.
CEB for Microsoft Teams and Operator Connect transform Microsoft Teams into a complete, globally capable communications and customer engagement platform powered by RingCentral.
availability
Currently available is AIR for branded messaging, international support for SMS notifications, Customer Engagement Bundle (CEB) for Microsoft Teams, and SMS inbox and call queue. RingCentral is accepting registration requests from early adopters of Rich Media Support and Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams. International SMS for Australia is currently under control and SMS for the UK will be available soon. Click here for additional information.
About RingCentral
RingCentral is a global leader in agentic voice AI-powered business communications, providing an integrated platform for business phones, SMS, contact centers, employee engagement management, video collaboration, and messaging. As the communications layer between businesses and customers, RingCentral is the front door for business communications, applying AI to every stage of the conversation: before, during, and after the conversation. Our agent AI portfolio includes autonomous voice-first AI agents that automate calls, provide instant assistance, and analyze every interaction, enabling businesses to work smarter, respond faster, and connect more meaningfully with their customers. For more information, please visit ringcentral.com.
© 2026 RingCentral, Inc. All rights reserved. RingCentral, RingCentral AI Receptionist, RingCentral AIR, and the RingCentral logo are trademarks of RingCentral, Inc.
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