RingCentral, a provider of enterprise cloud communications and collaboration solutions, will acquire Connect First, providers of a cloud-based outbound/blended customer engagement platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With the Connect First acquisition, the RingCentral Customer Engagement portfolio will include RingCentral Contact Center for inbound communications and Workforce Optimization, RingCentral Engage for digital customer engagement, and Connect First for outbound/blended customer interactions.
"Maximizing agent productivity in today's rapidly changing customer service environment is becoming increasingly challenging. Customer service organizations need to seamlessly blend outbound calling activity with customer callbacks and communications over digital channels," said Jim Dvorkin, senior vice president of customer engagement at RingCentral, in a statement. "The acquisition of Connect First complements our current Customer Engagement portfolio and will provide transformative and differentiated customer experiences. We're excited to welcome the Connect First team to RingCentral."
The Connect First cloud-native platform is built on a microservices architecture and runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). All of Connect First's capabilities are available through web-based APIs.
"At Connect First, we've been focused on building an innovative outbound/blended customer engagement platform with a state-of-the-art architecture," said Geoff Mina, founder and CEO of Connect First, in a statement. "This acquisition validates our technology leadership, and we're confident that by joining forces with RingCentral we will broaden our market reach and scale to deploy our platform to enterprises worldwide."
"As RingCentral continues to be chosen by larger businesses, the need to support outbound customer interactions and campaign management has increased," said Sheila McGee-Smith, president of McGee-Smith Analytics. "With its born-in-the-cloud microservices architecture, Connect First brings technology that has already been successfully deployed across mid-sized and enterprise organizations and will complement RingCentral's existing portfolio."