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We shopped each vendor on this list to finalize our picks for the best contact center software. We analyzed them according to important system features (for inbound, outbound, and omnichannel calling needs), limitations, customer experience features, desktop app only, AI features, skill-based call routing/handling, agent management and support, deployment and onboarding, and workforce management.
We’ve validated every data point by calling, emailing, obtaining quotes, signing up for service, live chatting with the service providers, establishing our own paid licenses/subscriptions (for 5 agents), and actually using the software with our own staff. All research and testing were conducted over the past 12 weeks as of this writing.
If there is something you'd like to see in this report or further review, please email me at ry@getvoip.com.
Who Made the Cut? Top Call Center Software of 2024
- Nextiva — Best value, ease of use, feature set, and customer support
- Five9 — Best supervisor and agent management features, video, and IVAs
- Dialpad — Best for AI features, agent flexibility, collaboration, and pricing
- RingCentral — Best for workforce management and Ai agent assist
- NICE — Best for AI auto-dialers, agent forecasting, and international calling
- Genesys — Best customer journey management and AI chatbots
- Talkdesk — Best customized agent analytics needs and automated outbound calling
- GoTo — Best for multichannel queuing and IT/support ticket management
- Aircall — Best for basic low-volume inbound and calling needs
- Twilio — Best for APIs and customized outbound mobile calling and texting
Nextiva Contact Center is an omnichannel solution known for its native CRM tools, robust VoIP features, and robust outbound dialer. The platform also has a useful screen pop feature, which notifies agents about each inbound call with customer data. Customers and reps can connect via social media messaging, email, website chat, voice calling, SMS, and email. Choose between a voice-only or complete omnichannel call center.
While Nextiva’s contact center offers a user-friendly interface, chatbots, and omnichannel routing, it truly sets itself apart from competitors with its Sales and Social Media add-ons. They cost extra but provide unique functionality, like the ability to monitor your company’s reputation, mentions, and social activity–all in one place. The Sales add-on helps agents track leads through the conversion pipelines, with an omnichannel journey history.
The biggest downside to Nextiva Contact Center is that it still requires an initial purchase of the Nextiva Business Communication software–so contact center capabilities are seen more as an “add-on” than a unique product.
- Skill-based routing: Nextiva routes digital channels–SMS, chat, and email–based on evaluated agent skills, improving customer service and first-contact resolution
- Easy-to-build workflows: The platform’s workflow designer and bot-creation tools use the same no-code interface, providing a familiar tool that admins can use to build automations across the whole contact center
- Integrates with UCaaS features: Nextiva also offers internal team collaboration tools with video meetings, team chat, a central file-sharing repository, omnichannel dashboard for internal email, and more. Teams can easily integrate the CCaaS and UCaaS platforms for call center functionality and enhanced team communication.
- Subpar audio quality: While many alternative providers use the modern Opuc codec, Nextiva’s phone system only uses the G.711 codec. Its audio quality is still superior to landline but captures a more limited audio-frequency range than alternatives.
- Missed inbound notifications: A few times our system failed to notify users about inbound calls or messages, allowing customer queries to fall through the cracks
- Lagging customer support: When an administrator needed quick support from Nextiva’s team, it sometimes took several hours–or even over a day–to receive the support. This can potentially cause major problems for companies having issues with their software.
- Call centers and voice-first contact centers: Nextiva is well-known for cloud-based business VoIP phone service, and its contact center offerings highlight voice as the main channel. The Core plan is a strong voice-only option with a desktop app, offering telephony-focused contact centers a reliable, easy-to-use platform.
- Companies that use social media for customer communication: Nextiva stands out with Social Media and Reputation Management add-ons that are native within the contact center interface. These add-ons offer single-pane tools to manage social media mentions, interactions, and responses across dozens of social media platforms.
- Companies with international calling needs: Nextiva’s call center currently only services North America, so call centers with international calling needs should look to other providers
- Call centers that need extensive supervisor support: While using Nextiva, we felt that its quality management and workforce optimization tools don’t stack up to those of competitors. While some alternatives offer automated forecasting and workflows to support supervisors in providing feedback, Nextiva’s workforce management tools are limited to basic coaching support.
Five9 is an omnichannel contact center software offering voice and digital channels, high-level WFO solutions, AI-powered analytics and automation, and user-friendly workflows.
Five9 is known for leveraging machine learning to optimize employee engagement and workforce management. WFM features like employee forecasting methods, live agent shift bidding, and real-time adherence monitoring eliminate workflow bottlenecks and optimize available agents.
The contact center software distinguishes itself from competitors with its broad use of AI tools, which extract insights from self-service interactions and also support agents during live calls. Five9’s conversation analysis software considers not only customer sentiment and emotion but the tone of their voice.
- Advanced AI: Five9 uses ChatGPT’s large language models to power live transcriptions and post-call summaries, which serve as call records and inform better customer service in real-time
- Intelligent virtual agents (IVA): Five9’s drag-and-drop designer builds smart IVAs across all channels for customer self-service. Five9’s virtual agent technology includes advanced features like multi-lingual support and sentiment analysis.
- Supervisor tools: The app’s supervisor dashboard gives managers an easy view of all the tools necessary to oversee their team–call monitoring, workforce management and scheduling, employee performance overviews, and analytics
- Inconsistent call quality: We experienced some periods of fuzzy audio and latency with Five9, although this only occurred a handful of times
- Multiple tabs open in the interface: Sometimes while using the Five9 interface, the app opens new tabs for certain features, channels, or pages. This can lead to a cluttered and disorganized user experience.
- Analytics customization: Five9’s analytics include many customizable features, but the analytics portal’s user interface feels overwhelming and confusing–especially at first
- Digital-first contact centers: Five9’s digital-only plan simplifies customer-service reps’ experience with a virtual agent builder, workflow designers, and an easy-to-use desktop app that unifies key digital channels.
- Customer service teams seeking to improve agent coaching: Five9 extensively integrates AI into their workforce management tools, to support supervisors and agents. Real-time transcriptions and AI-generated call summaries reduce agents’ after-work time and automated coaching insights support supervisors.
- Companies seeking a low-cost option: While Five9’s CCaaS platforms include advanced functionality and AI tools, their cheapest pricing options are $149–roughly twice the cost of some alternatives’ low-tier plans
- Contact centers that frequently text customers: The digital-only plan is Five9’s only plan that includes SMS texting. None of Five9’s voice or blended plans feature SMS, so teams seeking both SMS and voice must consider an alternative platform.
Dialpad offers some of the most dynamic and comprehensive AI support tools of any contact center on the market. Its CCaaS platform uses AI to power call transcription, live-agent assistance, automated coaching, customer sentiment scoring, and meeting transcription. Dialpad contact center plans integrate the company’s UCaaS platform to provide video meetings and team chat, in addition to the expected CCaaS channels: voice, email, web chat, social media messaging, chatbots, and virtual agents.
Dialpad is a good fit for teams that want AI-agent support, or those prioritizing internal team collaboration in addition to contact center functionality. The platform also has useful phone-system features like call monitoring with whisper and barge, queue callbacks, call distribution, and IVR and IVA menus across channels.
While Dialpad’s native team communication and collaboration features make it stand out in the CCaaS space, its lack of pricing transparency makes it difficult to estimate its overall value.
- Dialpad AI: Conversational AI for digital deflection, intelligent omnichannel routing, post-call summaries with real-time call transcripts, automated note-taking, action item creation, and knowledge base
- AI Sales: Add-on providing outbound auto-dialing with CRM integration, custom reports, voicemail drop, automated post-call notes, online video meetings via Dialpad Meetings, local presence dialing, and real-time agent speech recommendations
- AI CSAT: Automatically collects and analyzes conversations in real-time to provide AI-powered CSAT scores and updates, predictive analytics, agent assist, performance reports, and post-interaction SMS surveys
- AI video meetings: Dialpad contact center plans include the platform’s video meetings, which include interactive tools like chat and waiting rooms along with AI tools like live transcriptions and post-meeting summaries
- In-depth customer satisfaction: The platform includes AI-based CSAT detection that tracks customer satisfaction across interactions and maps this data on historical charts. Supervisors can compare customer satisfaction levels over time and between agents.
- SMS surveys: The contact center supports built-in SMS surveys, which you can customize and automate based on triggers like purchases or agent conversations. These surveys are a unique way to elicit feedback from customers.
- Lacks customization: The contact center interface and agent dashboard lack the customization options that some alternatives provide
- Inaccurate transcriptions: While Dialpad provides live transcriptions across video meetings and phone calls, we found these transcriptions inaccurate and unreliable at times
- Lengthy license removal process: The process for removing licenses from a Dialpad account took a few days longer than we planned. In some cases, this can lead to companies being charged for licenses that no agents are using.
RingCentral offers two contact center software options–the AI-powered RingCX, and a more traditional RingCentral Contact Center. Both platforms integrate smoothly with RingCentral’s industry-leading UCaaS platform and phone system.
RingCX offers a robust suite of AI tools–including automated call transcripts, summaries, keyword tracking, analytics, and coaching. RingCX has over 22 communication channels, an auto dialer technology, surveys, and advanced speech analytics. The CCaaS platform includes RingSense–a sales-focused AI tool that automatically gives insights and sentiment analysis for all calls.
RingCentral contact center offers over 30 channels along with many of the same useful features from RingCX–real-time analytics, customer journey analytics, virtual agents, an auto dialer, and AI-based agent assistance. The main difference is the RingCentral contact center does not include RingSense and therefore does not provide the same in-depth analysis as RingCX.
- Excellent sales support: RingSense is an AI-based software built to boost sales teams, generating unique insights for sales agents and supervisors
- UCaaS integration: RingCentral’s business phone system is one of the best on the market, and its collaborative UCaaS platform integrates seamlessly with the contact center. Teams already using RingCentral for UCaaS should strongly consider the CCaaS offering.
- Powerful analytics: The platform includes comprehensive and user-friendly real-time analytics. RingCentral’s analytics pull data from all channels, user activity, IVR and IVA activity, and agent performance evaluations–giving a full view of call center trends.
- Lack of transparent pricing: RingCentral’s lack of public pricing makes it difficult for teams to know exactly how the provider’s offerings compare with those of competitors
- Limited integrations: The Contact Center software integrates with some CRM platforms–Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Oracle. However, it lacks integrations with analytics tools and some popular CRM platforms like HubSpot.
- No customizability: While some alternatives allow admins to customize the user dashboard display, we were not able to customize RingCentral’s user interface
- Those with complex routing needs: Companies with multiple departments, whose customers call for various reasons, will benefit from RingCentral’s intricate routing options. The platform includes AI-based digital routing, skill-based routing, plus built-in queue callbacks to manage call centers with a busy inbound call load.
- Outbound sales departments: The platform includes various proactive outreach tools that augment sales efforts. Features like outbound auto dialers, advanced list management for dynamic customer profiles, and automated contact preferences help organize sales tactics.
- Those seeking to integrate CCaaS with third-party software: RingCentral’s contact center integrates with 8 third-party tools, including Salesforce, Oracle, and Spice CRM. However, it does not integrate with key tools like HubSpot, Slack, and many other platforms that other contact centers support.
- Support teams that want highly conversational chatbots: RingCentral lets you create virtual agents for phone and digital channels, but we found the chatbots to have limited conversational abilities. Customers must reply with buttons or predetermined responses. On the other hand, some alternatives let teams build adaptive chatbots that use natural language understanding for more dynamic interactions.
NICE CXOne is a contact center software with over 40 communication channels, automated self-service, employee engagement tools, and features for customer journey optimization. It sets itself apart from competitors not only by offering more communication channels than most but also by enabling users to create intelligent self-service tools.
NICE’s Enlighten Autopilot feature lets you augment self-service tools like IVR and IVAs with knowledge base content, pulled from articles and webpages. Paired with NICE’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU), this creates helpful self-service systems for your customers.
NICE also lets teams implement AI for live-agent support. The Enlighten AI conversation analysis tool measures 100% of omnichannel customer interactions in real-time. This information informs suggested agent responses for better customer service.
NICE uses AI for routing as well, to ensure omnichannel tasks reach the optimal agent. Admins can check routing summaries and KPIs particularly related to routing, such as the percentage of calls influenced by automated menus and the number of seconds saved per call.
- Cost-effective digital plan: CXone’s digital plan costs just $71, which is the cheapest contact center plan on our list. For teams that don’t need voice, the plan provides great value.
- 360-degree performance monitoring: The platform tracks interactions and agent performance across all channels, with transcripts and AI analysis for metrics like customer sentiment. This makes it much easier for supervisors to retain visibility across large teams.
- Easy-to-digest analytics: While some alternatives package their analytics in complicated reports, we found it easy to understand the analytics and KPIs in NICE CXone
- Agent self-monitoring: While supervisors retain an in-depth view of agent performance, agents themselves often are left in the dark about how they’re doing. The platform doesn’t provide a way for agents to monitor their own performance.
- Confusing script setup: We found it somewhat confusing to create scripts and call flows for our IVR menus and IVR systems. The drag-and-drop designer feels cluttered.
- Spotty voice quality with wireless: While we experienced consistently high audio quality with a wired Ethernet connection, we experienced some latency on calls when connected to the Internet via WiFi
- For those seeking customer data and journey insights: CXone’s Voice of the Customer and Customer Feedback Management features gather data across all communication channels, touchpoints, and paths–including bot interactions–to identify customer friction points and preferences. Administrators can use this data to refine customer service strategies.
- Call centers that need help with shift scheduling: NICE includes AI-based omnichannel forecasting, which automatically estimates staffing needs and schedules agents. The software also includes a mobile app for agents to set their own schedules, simplifying supervisors’ workflows.
- Those seeking a simple interface: Our research shows NICE CXone’s agent dashboard and analytics portal feels crowded and overwhelming, with a steep learning curve due to the abundance of features and menu options. Those seeking a simple call-center interface should consider alternatives.
- Supervisors monitoring a large number of agents: NICE CXone’s Live Monitoring page lets administrators view multiple departments and agents at once, jumping between them and joining calls live. However, we found it difficult to set up the Live Monitoring page with the supervision features we wanted, while other CCaaS platforms made it easier for supervisors to observe multiple departments.
Genesys Cloud CX is an omnichannel customer self-service and call center platform with 350+ pre-built integrations, voice and digital IVAs, and predictive engagement analytics.
Genesys has omnichannel communication features like customer-agent co-browsing, email routing, concurrent chat messaging, and typing indicators to improve the customer experience. The software has one of the most accurate AI-powered forecasting and scheduling systems that we tried, generating months worth of schedules in minutes.
The pricing structure is unique in that Genesys allows for digital-only contact centers, even for the most advanced pricing plan with features like AI-powered conversation analytics. The conversational AI tracks customer behavior across your websites and integrated apps, including shopping cart abandonment and pages visited, to identify patterns and needs.
- Consistent interface: Genesys Cloud CX uses the same drag-and-drop interface to orchestrate self-service tools and menus across channels and bots, making it easy for teams to learn how to customize these capabilities
- Unified admin controls: The app’s admin portal provides single-pane access to all capabilities, analytics, menus, user reports, and roles–including call distribution, groups, and scripts
- Natural language AI: The platform’s conversational AI uses Natural Language Understanding to power realistic automated interactions across all digital channels
- Difficult to aggregate bot interactions: While Genesys’ analytics track information from customer self-service interactions, we found it difficult to use the reports to understand patterns and trends in how our customers interacted with IVA, IVR, and other automations
- Connection with external databases: While Genesys provides an API-based architecture that connects contact center functionality with external databases, setting up these connections can feel confusing–even for those with coding experience
- Steep learning curve: When we first used Genesys, we felt overwhelmed by the number of features, tools, channels, and customization options. It will probably take most teams a few months to fully dive into the platform's capabilities.
- Teams seeking a low-cost DIY call center: Genesys Cloud 1 offers a complete call center, with IVR drag-and-drop call flows, for $75 monthly. No other call center on our list offers a lower-cost solution.
- Teams seeking to integrate their call center with other software: Genesys Cloud CX offers an open-API composable architecture, which allows you to integrate call center functionality and data with many other systems: databases, CRM platforms, analytics tools, and unified communications platforms.
- Those that frequently transfer calls between skill-based departments: We became frustrated with Genesys Cloud CX’s skills-based routing feature, because we noticed that we couldn’t edit the call’s tagged skills once the call had been answered. Agents can’t remove or tag new skills when transferring the task, which makes it hard to effectively transfer calls while using skills-based routing.
- Those that want to gather data from chatbots: We found it difficult to extract chatbot data, such as customer interactions, routing information, keywords, and conversation paths. For teams who rely on chatbots to greet and handle a large number of customer contacts, alternative platforms might provide an easier way to aggregate this bot data.
Talkdesk is a cloud contact center software that has uniquely advanced analytics, an intuitive interface, and strong AI-powered self-service tools.
It makes an ideal platform for companies reliant on customer self-service and proactive outbound automation. The Guardian Security Suite, which includes threat detection and compliance management, uses AI to identify suspicious activity and alert managers instantly. This makes Talkdesk a popular choice within heavily regulated industries like finance and healthcare.
The Talkdesk workspace is among the most customizable and user-friendly of all the providers we tried, for all roles–agent or supervisor. Populate the live-agent dashboard with CRM integrations, databases, various languages, and all channels with easy switching. The interface also displays customer information and queue statistics, keeping an agent on top of all tasks across channels.
- Affordable plans: Talkdesk’s contact center plans are among the most cost-effective on our list
- Voice-only or digital-only options: Companies can choose voice-only or digital-only contact centers, enabling flexibility in how you connect with your customers
- Interaction analytics: Each call uses AI for automated transcriptions. No matter the channel, each interaction is analyzed for customer sentiment and keywords, and supervisors can search and sort interactions by keyword and topic.
- Inconsistent caller ID: The Caller ID function does not reliably detect inbound caller phone numbers, even when a mobile phone has no problem identifying the correct ID for the inbound number
- User role customization: We felt that compared to competitors, Talkdesk offers fewer options for supervisors to customize user roles and access privileges
- AI in non-English languages: Talkdesk’s AI tools, transcription, and sentiment analysis work great for English but struggle to support other languages
- Companies in the insurance, banking, healthcare, or retail sector: Talkdesk’s Experience Clouds pricing plans offer feature packages that are hand-selected for these industries
- Call centers that want to provide interactive custom bot interactions: Talkdesk’s automation designer makes it easy for administrators to build AI-centered conversation flows for basically any call center touchpoint: survey flows, virtual agent discussions, or live-agent conversation scripts
- Call centers seeking a wide breadth of all-inclusive features: While Talkdesk plans offer specialized suites of advanced features, they don’t offer any plans with everything–customer experience analytics, agent assist, and workforce management tools. Teams that want the full variety of advanced features should look to pricier alternatives.
- Administrators looking to deep-dive into analytics: Talkdesk has strong automations and live-agent support tools, but we found the platform’s KPIs and analytics to be a weak point. The non-user-friendly interface and lack of KPI breadth make it difficult to create custom reports.
GoTo Contact Center provides easy-to-user agent and supervisor workspaces, including an intuitive drag-and-drop dial plan editor for inbound call flows. The contact center offers voice calling, SMS, webchat, and social media messaging channels.
Create call queues with automated callbacks, and SMS queues that make it easy for agents to stay on top of multiple conversations. Users have a task inbox that organizes all inbound activities across channels, with the ability to jump between channels during live interactions with one click.
Teammates can tag each other in chat conversations, agents and customers can co-browse on video for live guidance, and supervisors have access to full call monitoring with whisper and barge. Supervisors can view call and chat queues, making adjustments to queue orders or assisting agents when necessary.
- User-friendly: The GoTo Workspace and call flow designer were easy for us to understand. We were able to customize our inbound menus quickly without using any code.
- Multichannel queueing: GoTo’s queueing system organizes not only calls but texts–letting agents organize and manage their tasks across voice and digital channels
- Comprehensive analytics: GoTo’s analytics page offers an organized dashboard with a surprising breadth of KPIs–caller summary, average time in queue, trends in talk time and call volume, and more
- No AI tools: GoTo’s contact center does not feature any AI tools, which we found disappointing since many alternatives on our list heavily integrate AI
- Lacks a virtual agent: GoTo Contact Center does not enable users to build a virtual agent or chatbot, which we feel is a critical contact center feature
- Insufficient performance management: We believe that supervisors rely on tools like call transcription and sentiment analysis to evaluate agent performance. While most alternatives support this functionality, GoTo Contact Center does not include these capabilities.
- Outbound sales teams: GoTo Contact Center offers several features that streamline outbound sales efforts. Agents can use the auto dialer to quickly jump from contact to contact and create pre-recorded voicemails to “drop” into each contact’s voicemail box.
- Those seeking to connect with customers via video: GoTo Contact Center includes video meetings as a communication channel, enabling support staff to text or message customers a video-meeting link for face-to-face interactions
- Teams seeking advanced CCaaS features: GoTo Connect is perhaps the simplest contact center on our list. It lacks advanced features like AI support, customer sentiment detection, workforce and quality management tools, and chatbots. Teams seeking an advanced contact center will be better served with a different option.
- Support Teams that assist customers via email: GoTo Contact Center integrates SMS, voice, video, social media, and webchat. However, the agent dashboard does not integrate email, which could be a drawback for some support teams.
Aircall has a unique balance between unified communications and contact center functionality. The software doesn't include the advanced CCaaS features offered by other providers on our list–features like workforce management and live-agent assistance–but it does include useful call center tools like automated queue callbacks and an outbound powerdialer.
Accessible on desktop or mobile, Aircall has inbound and outbound tools to support a wide variety of use cases. The Powerdialer boosts sales efforts, while the advanced routing and queueing supports inbound customer service. Real-time queue analytics and monitoring help supervisors keep tabs on a larger team of agents. Agents can collaborate with a shared inbox, shared contacts, and the ability to assign calls to each other.
Many of Aircall’s features go above and beyond UCaaS platforms. So while Aircall doesn’t quite match the advanced features from other CCaaS providers, it provides great value for its plans’ $30 and $50 price points.
- User-friendly interface: We found Aircall’s interface to be spacious and comfortable, both on mobile and desktop. We quickly figured out how to use the call features, collaboration tools, and analytics.
- Value for the price: Aircall provides tremendous value for the price. The software costs the same as most UCaaS platforms but offers some call center features, like an outbound power dialer and automated queue callbacks.
- Collaboration tools: Aircall separates itself from some other CCaaS platforms by offering a helpful variety of collaboration tools. Agents can’t message each other directly, but they can assign tasks and contacts to each other, commenting on each to delineate support queries.
- Frequent signouts: While using the product, we found the Aircall frequently signed us out of the software, forcing our users to log back in repeatedly throughout the day
- 6-month analytics history: The app only stores analytics data for the past six months. If a company wants to track trends and changes further back, they’re out of luck.
- Limited channel offering: Aircall doesn’t offer social media or live chat, meaning teams can’t build chatbots, IVA systems, or provide the comprehensive 1:1 support that they could with other providers that offer these channels
- Sales and customer-support centers: The software offers a blend of inbound and outbound features that support sales and customer-service use cases. The outbound power dialer helps with outgoing efforts, while the routing and queueing tools help navigate inbound-calling customers.
- Flexible and on-the-go agents: Aircall’s app is accessible on desktop and mobile. We found the mobile app exceptionally user-friendly, full of the collaborative features from the desktop app.
- Multichannel contact centers: Aircall offers phone and SMS, without other channels like live chat or social media messaging. Organizations that want to service customers via chatbots and IVA should choose an alternative.
- Companies seeking comprehensive CCaaS features: Aircall’s software lacks many of the features offered by alternatives on our list. It lacks quality management tools like schedule forecasting and performance monitoring, and it doesn’t include AI-support tools like call transcription and sentiment scoring. Teams that want in-depth customer metrics must look elsewhere.
Twilio Flex
Twilio Flex is a programmable contact center built on the Twilio cloud communications platform. Unlike other providers on this list, Twilio Flex can be completely customized from the ground up via Twilio APIs, integrations with pre-existing software, SDKs, and workflow-building tools. This enables teams to customize the agent dashboard display, the types of tools and channels agents can access during calls, the integrated apps, the workflows, and analytics. Add on APIs for mass marketing and 1:1 email, voice calling, SMS and live chat messaging, video calling, and more.
The omnichannel contact center lets you engage with customers via VoIP, SMS, messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, live chat, chatbots, and others. The software uses Google Contact Center AI to power intelligent call transcripts, chatbot interactions, and live-agent support. Flex also includes a customizable IVR and TaskRouter, which intentionally routes inbound queries to the right agent.
While this level of customization is perfect for businesses with existing applications, smaller businesses without an in-house IT department or development team may struggle to leverage Flex due to the level of coding knowledge and experience it requires.
- Intelligent routing: Twilio Flex includes TaskRouter, which automatically assigns tasks to agents across all channels. TaskRouter weighs several factors like agent skills, the communication channel, and predesigned workflows to route tasks to the optimal agent.
- Usage of Google CCAI: Twilio Flex has integrated Google Cloud Contact Center AI (CCAI) to power highly intelligent virtual agents across all channels. CCAI also gives agents real-time suggestions that are more intelligent than the AI support tools from alternative providers.
- Customizability: Twilio Flex enables developers to customize nearly all aspects of the platform–including the interface and display, integrated apps and plugins, and the analytics
- Requires a developer: Many of the platform’s benefits and customizations require a substantial amount of coding, so we recommend that teams using Flex have a programmer
- Confusing pricing: While Flex offers per-hour and monthly per-user pricing options, the platform’s customizability makes it difficult to estimate your account’s true monthly expenses. We incurred a few fees that we didn’t expect.
- Cluttered interface: The contact interface is dynamic but can feel overwhelming–with too many channels, buttons, and integrated options that intimidate the user
- Organizations offering limited customer-service hours: Twilio Flex uniquely offers per-hour pricing, which charges users for each active hour. For teams whose agents only work a few days per week, or teams that only provide customer service for a small window during the day, per-hour pricing may provide strong value.
- Sales teams: Flex offers stellar customization options, allowing teams to integrate click-to-message entry points on advertisements and paid searches. Add custom click-to-call and click-to-text buttons into your internal lead management system, making it easier for sales agents to call or text customers directly from an integrated lead list.
- Organizations without a knowledgeable software development team: Twilio Flex is highly customizable, with a flexible dashboard and the ability to integrate with a nearly limitless amount of other software. However, this API-based customizability requires a developer, so contact centers without a developer will struggle to create a contact center using Flex.
- Teams seeking an out-of-the-box solution: Some of the platforms on our list, like RingCentral and Nextiva, offer CCaaS platforms that come ready-made. Twilio Flex requires lots of developer-dependent customization and makes a poor fit for teams that want to plug and play.
3 Types of Call Center Solutions to Know
Below are the most popular types of modern solutions:
Inbound and Outbound call solutions
- Focuses on managing incoming calls efficiently.
- Includes features like IVR (Interactive Voice Response), ACD (Automatic Call Distribution), and skills-based routing to direct inbound callers.
- Designed for agents to make outgoing calls effectively.
- Often includes auto-dialer, predictive dialer, and CRM integration for sales, surveys, and customer follow-ups.
- It can combine the functionalities of both inbound and outbound call center software.
- Enables agents to handle both incoming inquiries and make outgoing calls as needed, optimizing agent utilization.
Omnichannel solutions
- Supports multiple communication channels such as voice, email, live chat, SMS, and social media.
- Enables a unified agent interface to manage communications across all channels, improving customer experience.
- Provides a seamless customer experience across all channels by integrating and synchronizing interactions.
- Allows customers to switch between channels without losing context, improving satisfaction and efficiency.
Workforce Optimization (WFO) Software
- Focuses on improving agent performance and operational efficiency.
- Includes features like quality monitoring, workforce management, training tools, and analytics.
- Learn more about Workforce optimization.
Important System Features to Consider
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a self-service feature consisting of pre-recorded call menu options that customers interact with via touch-tone or speech. These customers provide information about the reason for their call and help them connect with the right agent/department.
- Automatic Call Distribution (ACD): automatic call distribution automatically routes callers according to pre-set call routing strategies.
- Call Routing: Call routing strategies are the ways in which calls are routed to agents in order to maximize productivity. The main call routing strategies are: list-based routing, round-robin routing, skills-based routing, and simultaneous ringing
- Call Scripting: Call scripting provides on-call agents with a written script or flowchart that guides them through customer interaction. Many providers offer live call transcription with keyword detection, using this data to determine the conversation’s topic and sentiment. With this information, the system provides agents with suggested responses, relevant links, and knowledge-base articles.
- Automated Queue Callbacks: Automated queue callbacks eliminate the need for callers to wait on hold for extended periods of time, instead receiving a callback from an available agent based on their preferred time and date.
- Auto Dialers: Automated dialing modes streamline outbound calling efforts, using campaign lists often provided by your CRM system. Most call center solutions will offer multiple dialing modes, including: power dialer, progressive dialer, predictive dialer, and preview dialer.
- Call Queueing: Call queuing allows multiple callers to wait on hold until an available agent is free to assist them. Companies can create multiple queues and assign agents to each queue.
- Call Recording: This feature records agent and customer calls either automatically or on-demand, storing these recordings for later review or download.
- Reporting and Analytics: Real-time and historical analytics provide insights into call center activity and efficiency through tracking KPIs. Reports can be completely customized, or admins can choose from a variety of pre-made report templates.
- Call Monitoring: Call monitoring allows a supervisor to listen in on a live call, whisper private guidance, barge into the call, or take it over entirely. It’s often used to evaluate new agents to provide better training, monitor individual agent performance, or better understand customer needs.
- Omnichannel Routing: Omnichannel routing receives inbound contact from all communication channels and automatically routes them to the best-suited agent.
- Automation: Call center applications automate almost every agent's workflow and tasks. The call distribution system routes inbound calls and messages to the optimal agent. Agents receive call pops and caller history for all new tasks in their queue.
- AI tools: Call centers utilize generative AI and machine learning to enhance customer experience and make employee efforts more efficient. Build intelligent virtual agents (IVA) within live chat or text. Machine learning transcribes calls live and gives real-time agent support, in an AI call center platform.
How to Choose the Best Vendor
When looking for the best call center software provider, it’s important to consider features, communication channels, the type of call center you are running, and pricing–all related to your business needs.
Aside from knowing and identifying your product-specific needs, here are important considerations:
Ability to deliver on use cases
Dive deep into the use case reports being presented to you. Each vendor should have an expansive catalog use of use cases. Understanding those use cases is crucial. It isn't always black and white. Highlight things you like in the use cases, and set those expectations. If the potential provider deflects on expectations, that should be a red flag. If your company receives a large number of inbound calls, especially for a variety of reasons–like technical support, customer service, billing information, product questions, sales–you should choose a call center provider with advanced routing and queueing capabilities.
In particular, look for a provider with multiple use cases in your industry and company size.
Investment in R&D
Most vendors should have an R&D department that's working on building new features and expanding existing features. If a vendor does not invest in R&D that means their product isn't moving forward, and will eventually lack services/features you need.
Financial health
While some vendors are in growth mode, you want to understand how healthy they are financially. This info is easy to find for public companies. Private companies should disclose their financial positions to secure your trust in their ability to stay in business.
Analyst Recognitions
Look for vendors that appear on Gartner's Magic Quadrant and other similar industry and analyst reports.
Pricing and Plans
Considering the features and channels you shortlisted, you want to select the provider and pricing plan that offers the most value for your company. Compare all the providers who offer the features you want, then take a closer look at their plans. Choose the pricing tier that includes your prioritized features without too many extra features you won’t use.
In general, choose the pricing tier that includes your prioritized features without too many features you won’t use. This way, you can select a provider and pricing tier that meets your budget. For more, check out our detailed guide on call center software pricing.
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