RingCentral to acquire Boulder’s Connect First

BOULDER — RingCentral Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a provider of enterprise cloud communications, entered into an agreement to acquire Connect First.

Connect First is a cloud-based outbound/blended customer engagement platform for midsize and enterprise companies. Connect First is a Boulder company. RingCentral is based in Belmont, Calif.

“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 call backs and communications over digital channels,” Jim Dvorkin, senior vice president of customer engagement for RingCentral, said in a written 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.”

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The Connect First platform provides key features to improve the outbound/blended customer experience and responsiveness of agents. It does so by providing tools such as dynamic agent scripting to help guide agent interactions with customers, real-time historical reporting and analytics for supervisors call blending to maximize productivity.

Connect First provides cloud-based contact center technology, enabling large groups of people to communicate with customers, Connect First CEO Geoff Mina told BizWest. The company has been around for 14 years and relocated to Boulder from Atlanta in 2010. There are just under 50 employees in Boulder.

Connect First specializes in the voice portion of contact center technology and was one of the first companies to provide a cloud solution.

“Being in the cloud removes barriers of entry for someone who might want to start a contact center but don’t have $2 million to own outright their equipment and installation,” Mina said. “We’ve developed novel technology to say you don’t need to come up with a lot of money, you can use us and get up and go.”

Through Connect First’s cloud solution, agents can access what they need through a web browser anywhere with their login, rather than requiring software or equipment.

“At Connect First, we’ve been focused on building an innovative outbound/blended customer engagement platform with a state-of-the-art architecture,” Mina said in a written 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.”

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2019.

This story was edited to include quotes from Connect First CEO Geoff Mina.