Thu. Mar 28th, 2024
Call Center Software

Nothing scares customers away like hard-to-reach customer service or disorganized sales calls.

Using the best call center and sales team collaboration software can outfit your teams with the tools they need to communicate more effectively.

Forget about the requirements of physical office space or a landline. Modern call center software is all you need to get employees set up, no matter where they are working.

You still have the hard work of engaging your customers and clients, but all the heavy lifting associated with maintaining a call center is off your plate.

Read on for in-depth reviews of my top picks. I’ll explain what they offer and the types of businesses they work well for.

After the reviews, I’ve included a brief guide to help you evaluate the leading options and find the one that’s best for you.

#1 – Nextiva — The Best Way to Take Your Call Center Virtual

We’re quickly leaving the days where call centers only exist in a phone bank in your building. VoIP has made communication from anywhere possible and Nextiva’s platform delivers a full solution for taking your call center and overall communications virtual.

It’s all built on Nextiva One, their all-encompassing VoIP solution that covers voice, video, text, fax, and team chat.

Some call centers can likely get away with the lowest-priced Nextiva One plan—Essential—because it comes with unlimited voice and video calling, an auto attendant, Outlook and Google Contacts integration, and local and toll-free numbers. For most teams, that just runs you about $20 per user per month (pricing scales up for fewer users and vice versa).

However, for useful extras like CRM integration, call pop, texting, and conferencing, I suggest the Professional plan, which is just $4 more per user per month than Essential.

#2 – Aircall — The Lowest Price on Complete Call Center Software

For less than half the cost of other good call center software, you can outfit your agents with Aircall.

Aircall is sleek and integrates with popular business apps. The interface feels lightweight and it’s super easy to navigate, even for first-timers.

You might think a low price would mean that you don’t get as many helpful features. That’s not really true.

Transfer calls to another agent. Make it a warm transfer and let the new agent know what’s happening before passing the customer over. View a customer’s record before you pick up the call without having to sign into your CRM. It’s all right there.

#3 – Dialpad — The Safe Way to Migrate a Traditional Call Center to the Cloud

Dialpad is a phenomenal cloud-based call center that ties into traditional landline infrastructure. You can go total cloud day one, if you want, or stay hybrid and modernize at your own pace.

This allows companies to maintain their investment in hardware, while immediately taking advantage of the cloud-based platform. Unify your business phone system with text, chat, fax, and web conferencing. Allow your employees to work from the office as easily as from home.

Migrating your phone system to the cloud is stressful. Lots of vendors promise a turnkey solution, but anyone who has ever handled a large scale business communications transition knows it’s rarely that simple.

Dialpad offers two on-premise gateway options to connect your traditional phones to its cloud platform. Whether you rely on a traditional PBX or the PTSN, you can continue to use existing systems seamlessly.

#4 – Five9 — Best for Reaching More Customers Without Adding Reps 

Five9 centralizes every channel you use within a single clean interface for your employees. It works for any call center application–Five9 is one of the leading providers in the space–but I think it stands out for sales teams.

Discover and connect with leads on social media. Call someone who just filled out a form on your landing page. Answer text inquiries with an email follow up.

No matter how your customers show interest, your reps can talk with them from a single platform. Whether you’re building relationships over a long sales cycle or telemarketing directly to consumers, Five9 gives your reps the tools they need.

You get an auto dialer with multiple modes for prospecting and working through call lists. It comes with built-in calls to manage Do Not Call Lists and maintain TCPA compliance, which lowers your risk of running into issues with outreach at scale.

The same rep who was making 10 calls an hour now makes 50 without breaking a sweat. Everything is tracked in a few clicks within the system, and they are on to the next lead.

#5 – 8×8 Contact Center — Best for Large Customer Service Call Centers

8×8 Contact Center is one of the more robust tools on the market. 8×8 has been around for a long time and can fully support migration to a UCaaS contact center.

You can set it up for any size or purpose, but I recommend it highly for large customer service call centers. Why? Because working in these environments is stressful. There’s high turnover, as new agents struggle to deal with irate customers and veteran supervisors burnout.

8×8 gives you a complete set of tools to fully support agents and help supervisors keep morale high. You’ll be able to retain talent by making the day-to-day a little bit less hectic, and happier agents lead to happier customers.

Imagine day one for a new hire at a call center. If they’re working on 8×8, they’ll have everything they need as soon as they put on a headset. This includes easy access to a deep knowledge base of call scripts, best practices, and a library of recorded calls that showcase agents at their best.

The speech analytics tools are really helpful as well. You can use them to ensure that new hires are sticking to the script, and they will be able to read voicemails instead of having to listen to them. This makes it easier for agents to scan through the backlog for important calls.

Supervisors can use the speech analytics to discover trends in customer inquiries and potential gaps in efficiency that would be impossible to bring to the surface otherwise. They’ll also have a dashboard that reports important metrics clearly, making it easy to recognize when agents require more support.

By