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Nextiva offers a robust call center solution for business large and small. Nextiva Call Center allows companies to deploy a contact center in the cloud for inbound and outbound calling campaigns. Smaller organizations can now acce...Read more about Nextiva Call Center
Five9 is an all-in-one cloud contact center solution for inbound, outbound, blended and omnichannel contact centers world-wide. Powered by Practical AI, Five9 enables agents to provide customer experiences across phone, emai...Read more about Five9
CallShaper is a cloud-based call center management solution suitable for small to midsize businesses. Key features include lead management, real-time reporting, agent monitoring and tablet support. CallShaper enables users to...Read more about CallShaper
FrontRunners 2022
Talkdesk is a cloud-based call center solution that helps businesses improve customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing customer support costs. It uses interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution (ACD) a...Read more about Talkdesk
CloudAgent is a cloud-based call center solution that enables businesses to engage and interact with customers via multiple channels including voice, chat, email, SMS messages and social media platforms. Professionals can utilize ...Read more about CloudAgent
RingCentral's predictive dialer makes missed calls and ones that go directly to voicemail a thing of the past. Reduce agent downtime and time between calls, so your agents spend more time making valuable customer connections and c...Read more about RingCentral Engage Voice
FrontRunners 2022
PhoneBurner is an outbound call center solution that allows users to log in from their computer and make calls from the connected phone, using imported or admin-provided lead lists. The system offers functionalities that include p...Read more about PhoneBurner
FrontRunners 2022
For quickly growing businesses looking to efficiently scale their support teams, Dialpad provides a cloud-based call center with access to real-time customer insights. Dialpad allows users to onboard quickly and focus on deliverin...Read more about Dialpad
Infobip omnichannel ommunications platform is powering a broad range of solutions, messaging channels, and tools for advanced customer engagement, security, authentication, support, and retention. ...Read more about Infobip
ReadyMode is a cloud-based call center solution for companies of all sizes in a variety of industries. Key features include automatic call distribution, interactive voice response, auto dialing, scheduling, performance analytics a...Read more about ReadyMode
ULTATEL enables people to work together and get the information they need to do their best work, anywhere they are. Our cloud platform brings together phone, video, messaging, texts and business apps, allowing people to connect, ...Read more about ULTATEL Cloud Business Phone System
FrontRunners 2022
LiveVox (Nasdaq: LVOX) is a powerful, next generation contact center platform that powers more than 14 billion interactions a year. They seamlessly integrate omnichannel communications, CRM, AI, and WFO capabilities to deliver exc...Read more about LiveVox
Alvaria Cloud is a web-based customer engagement center suitable for organizations with 100 or more concurrent and named users. The system is a complete set of customer service capabilities including self-service, omnichannel inbo...Read more about Alvaria Cloud
net2phone Canada is a cloud-based business phone service provider, helping Canadian organizations drive business performance through powerful uCaaS tools. Trusted by clients and partners across the country, net2phone Canada has di...Read more about net2phone Canada
SingleComm is the all-in-one contact center solution that offers best-in-class solutions designed to optimize the agent-customer experience from a single unified desktop. Reduce agent training time 50% with drag-and-drop workflow...Read more about SingleComm
Webex brings together Calling, Meeting and Messaging modes of collaboration into a seamless, engaging, inclusive and intelligent experience. Seamless collaboration across devices, locations and organizations • Use any computer, t...Read more about Webex
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based CRM ecosystem for small, medium and enterprise organizations, with a focus on Sales, Field Service, Customer Service complete with strong integrations with Microsoft’s other Office 365 offer...Read more about Dynamics 365
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses provide effortless service across every customer touchpoint. Freshdesk empowers businesses to monitor customer conversations across email, phone, chat, soc...Read more about Freshdesk
Zoho Desk is a cloud-based help desk solution from Zoho Corporation, catering to businesses of all sizes. Key features include management of customer support tickets, a customer support portal, contract management and report creat...Read more about Zoho Desk
LiveAgent is an online Help Desk solution for e-commerce businesses at the small and midsize levels. The platform offers live chat application, ticket management, online self-service portals, and change and license management, all...Read more about LiveAgent
Call center systems share characteristics with both standard business phone systems (also known as PBX systems) and customer service/help desk solutions. At the same time, call center software offers a number of dedicated features for both agents and supervisors that can't be found in other types of business communications solutions.
This buyers guide will cover the major differences and points of overlap between these software categories to help you understand which best fits your needs. We'll also highlight the specific functionality that can only be found in a true call center solution.
Here's what we'll cover:
Simply put, this is an umbrella term for applications dedicated for use in either a formal or informal call center. The closely related term "contact center software" is in many cases a synonym, but also refers to features used in call centers that handle a number of communication channels in addition to voice (e.g., email, instant messaging, SMS text, social media, and live chat).
Call center software supports the agents whose job it is to assist customers over the phone, or via one of those other channels. It also supports the supervisors who oversee the call center's operations.
Here are some common functionalities you can expect to find in a typical call center software package:
Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) |
Parks incoming calls in a queue, where callers wait until an agent is available. Most call center systems are capable of a special mode of ACD known as skills-based routing, which distributes calls to agents based on rules that factor in agent skills and performance metrics. Simpler modes of ACD can be found in standard business phone systems. |
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) |
The technology underlying the voice menus that allow callers to complete actions over the phone via voice or keypad input. IVR systems share similarities with auto attendants, but are much more flexible, enabling callers to do things such as paying a bill or checking an account balance. IVR systems are defining components of inbound call center solutions. Businesses that only need to direct callers to the right extension don't need IVR; a standard business phone system and an auto attendant will suffice. |
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) |
A jargon term for integrations between phone systems and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. CTI integrations add features both to CRM systems and call center systems. CRM systems gain click-to-dial functionality, where agents click on a customer's phone number in a database of contacts to dial out. Contact center systems gain "screen pop" (screen population) functionality, or displays that instantly appear on contact center agents' screens when they receive an inbound call. Screen pops pull data about the inbound caller from the CRM system to help the agent better manage the interaction. |
Auto dialers |
Applications that automatically dial numbers from a list or at random. There are 3 major types:
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Workforce scheduling |
Enables forecasting of staffing requirements based on historical data. |
Performance analytics and reporting |
Captures and analyzes information about agent interactions (frequently via integration with a call recording application for easy retrieval of problem calls). This information is fed into agent scorecards and reports on team-wide statistics such as abandonment rate and average time in queue. |
Call center scripting |
Enables supervisors to program agent scripts for sales calls and customer service calls. Also allows supervisors to control operational rules for calls and generates fields that feed data from calls into the CRM system. |
Monitor/whisper/barge |
These are three standard call control features used by call center supervisors:
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Call center systems are built on the same technology as business phone systems, and offer many of the same features. Additionally, help desk and customer service solutions can be viewed as a specialized category of contact center software.
Here are the major differences:
We've already seen that there's significant overlap between call center systems, business phone systems, and customer service systems. Different categories of buyers will need different types of solutions:
Contact center software has evolved as customers’ expectations and needs have shifted with the rise of mobile devices and social media. The following trends are particularly important to consider when selecting a solution:
Multi-channel contact centers: As more customers seek to engage businesses through other channels than voice (e.g., SMS text, live chat, and email), contact center software has evolved to enable agents to interact via these additional channels. Interactions across all channels in a multi-channel system feed into a unified agent queue.
Social media: Contact center software vendors are increasingly offering modules that allow agents to manage interactions via social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. New analytics tools also help businesses data-mine social media for signs of potential customer issues before phones start ringing.
Virtual queuing/web callback: Traditionally, callers had to wait on hold to maintain their place in an ACD queue. Now, a new technology known as web callback or virtual queueing allows callers to "virtually" hold their place in the queue after they hang up in order to receive a callback later. While this technology has proven popular with consumers, it's still not a standard offering in call center systems. If this is a must-have feature, you'll need to shortlist vendors that offer it.
Speech/text analytics: Call center reporting traditionally focused on metrics such as call length and call abandonment. Now, systems are emerging that can analyze audio data to detect anger, frustration and other emotions in callers' vocal tones. The results of this analysis can be used to identify trends in the performance of agents and the contact center as a whole.
Text analytics is used to scour textual interactions (e.g., emails, SMS text messages, and instant messages) for certain keywords that indicate frustration or satisfaction on the part of the customer. While powerful, these tools are still relatively rare offerings compared to standard applications such as ACD and call recording.