5 Best Call Center Phone Systems for 2022

The best call center phone systems deliver feature-packed, inexpensive solutions for small businesses. In addition to essential call center system features, certain providers provide advanced routing, reporting, and collaboration tools, fulfill compliance requirements, and enable you to do business globally. We looked at several options to help you find the best call center phone system that aligns with your business needs.

• Freshdesk Contact Center: Overall best call center phone system, and best full-featured Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) software
• Talkdesk: Top call center phone system for service reliability
• RingCentral Contact Center: The best call center system for agent collaboration
• CloudTalk: The best call center phone system for businesses with an international presence
• Five9: Best system for fulfilling regulatory compliance and protecting customer data

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Freshdesk Contact Center: Best Overall Call Center Phone System

*Rates are based on an annual payment plan. Monthly plans are available but amount to a higher overall cost. Phone numbers cost an extra $1 to $2 per month, and per-minute charges apply.

Freshdesk Contact Center (formerly Freshworks’ Freshcaller) is our best overall call center phone system thanks to a wealth of useful options and a series of plans for businesses looking to scale. As a provider, they are a cloud-based private branch exchange (PBX) solution specializing in delivering customers features that require expensive on-site hardware.

Like CloudTalk, Freshdesk grants access to multiple international numbers. This allows customers in more than 90 countries to reach your business without paying long-distance fees.

Freshdesk Contact Center specializes in the virtual contact center, and as a result, inbound and outbound dialing is done via softphone apps, call center phones, or smartphone apps. This is especially useful as contact centers start to push their outreach and call receipt into the remote workplace.

This is also a call center solution that offers the rare free plan. The Sprout plan is completely free and provides call center metrics, custom greetings, and call notes. While it doesn’t include features like local numbers, toll-free numbers, and per-minute calling, a plan like this is useful for businesses that don’t call regularly enough to warrant a full-blown subscription.

For those who might like to try what’s available with a paid subscription, there’s a lengthy 21-day free trial. Get a more detailed look into this CCaaS provider in our Freshdesk Contact Center review.

Freshdesk Contact Center Features

• Custom reporting: Freshdesk can automatically build reports and send them to your inbox at a preset time. These reports include conversation analytics, team analytics, agent summaries, and call breakdowns.
• Queue management: With Freshdesk Contact Center, you can customize the queues to handle calls more efficiently. For example, your agents can customize greetings based on caller history and automatically transfer specific callers to certain agents.
• Historical activity data: This CCaaS solution automatically generates data on each interaction. This includes call logs, recordings, and voicemail transcriptions, so that agents are ready for each call.

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Talkdesk: Best Call Center Phone System for Service Reliability

*Talkdesk doesn’t have cheaper annual pricing, but the provider offers per our login consumption and concurrent pricing. Pricing for these types of plans are unpublished, but they are based on a minimum three-year commitment of these editions.

Talkdesk focuses on delivering must-have features for call centers so that a small business can easily hit the ground running. For example, Talkdesk has international numbers, although to just 40 countries, which is fewer than competitors like Freshdesk and CloudTalk. By default, the system also has 60 integrations immediately available for all subscribers.

One call center phone system feature that is lacking with some providers is speech analytics. This artificial intelligence (AI) software analyzes customer responses for a more detailed accounting of each interaction. Talkdesk includes this feature in its CX Cloud Elite plan and above. Speech analytics is absolutely useful for a business looking to provide a more personalized experience for its customers.

When you’re running a call center, the most damaging thing that could happen during business hours is a sudden loss in service. While you could lose calling capability due to internet outages, having the issue happen as a result of your provider is unacceptable. For this reason, most providers offer 99.9%, 99.99%, and 99.999% uptime service level agreements (SLAs). Talkdesk is one of the exceedingly few that offers a 100% uptime guarantee at their Elite plan tier. Check out more features in our Talkdesk review.

Talkdesk Features

• Omnichannel features: Talkdesk has engagement features designed to reach your customers wherever they prefer. This includes email, short message service (SMS) texting, live chat, and social media.
• Rich integration options: Talkdesk has more than 60 out-of-the-box integrations as well as over 80 AppConnect marketplace integrations. This is very useful for companies needing help desk, customer relationship management (CRM), or collaboration software integrations within their call center phone system.
• Default IVR: As a provider that focuses on AI contact, Talkdesk grants subscribers a multilevel IVR with self-service features at its base-level plan. This is very useful for businesses with a large influx of calls.

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RingCentral Contact Center: Best Call Center Phone System for Collaboration

While RingCentral has made a name for itself in the world of voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) and unified communications as a service (UCaaS), it also has a robust contact center offering. The RingCentral Contact Center includes several key features, such as omnichannel routing, advanced voice recording, and click-to-call, allowing agents to dial directly from the software or through integrated customer relationship management (CRM) software.

In addition to robust contact center features, some RingCentral MVP features are also provided. By default, every RingCentral Contact Center subscription tier grants access to features like free domestic calling, companywide communication and collaboration, and real-time metrics and notifications to RingCentral MVP via Pulse.

These features add UCaaS-like functionality to this CCaaS software. Still, there are a few noteworthy drawbacks. For example, RingCentral doesn’t publish pricing data for this branch of their cloud services.

Also, certain features that some would call essential, like predictive, progressive, and preview dialers, are only available as add-ons. In contrast, Freshdesk Contact Center software includes a power dialer in its third tier in the Pro plan. Still, having the support of RingCentral’s business communications ecosystem may well be worth the potential extra expenditure. Read more in our RingCentral review.

RingCentral Contact Center Features

• Advanced reports: You need a holistic view of your call center system, and RingCentral Contact Center provides over 90 real-time and historical reports. This provides a chronicle for tracking call center key performance indicators (KPIs) and determining what works and what doesn’t. The analytics quality is easily on par with the impressive reports available with their small business VoIP service.
• Advanced supervisor tools: Supervisors can record any conversation or screen, monitor what’s happening on a call, and use text and speech analytics tools. This provides important insights and helps supervisors manage all aspects of a call center’s operations.
• Self-service: RingCentral MVP already has one of the most advanced IVR systems, and its incorporation into this CCaaS solution adds important versatility. Rather than talk to your agents, the multi-level IVR system grants customers important self-service options so that they don’t have to wait.

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CloudTalk: Best Call Center Phone System for International Numbers

*Pricing is based on an annual payment plan. Monthly plans are available at a higher cost. Outbound calls are priced on a per-minute basis.

CloudTalk stands out as one of the best call center phone systems for businesses in need of international numbers. You can establish numbers in up to 140 countries, which is the highest of all the call center systems in this guide. This is ideal for businesses with multilingual agents. Also, reaching out to your team will be the same price as a local call for the caller.

Like RingCentral, CloudTalk also has a multilevel IVR system that allows customers to not only reach various departments easier but also to use self-service options. Also like RingCentral, CloudTalk has an intuitive call flow builder that allows you to drag and drop menus into the system.

When it comes to agent support, CloudTalk stands out again. During calls, agents can “raise their hand” to get supervisory attention. The supervisor can monitor the call to check out the situation, whisper additional information to the agent that the customer can’t hear, or drop in on the call to assist. There’s also a warm transfer feature that enables agents to pass off calls to more experienced coworkers. In our CloudTalk review, we hit on many of the other features that make this provider a worthy solution for many small businesses.

CloudTalk Features

• CRM integration: CloudTalk connects to multiple CRMs, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Zoho CRM. This makes the adjustment of call records easy and allows your agents to always be educated about caller histories.
• Call recording and storage: This provider grants this service at all plan tiers. This allows supervisors and agents to review recorded conversations before making outbound attempts.
• International numbers: CloudTalk grants numbers in more than 140 countries. This provides companies with an international presence to connect with customers overseas.

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Five9: Best Call Center Phone System for Regulatory Compliance

*Additional provider-specific data

Some call centers need to handle electronically protected health information (ePHI). When this is the case, the center needs to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) so that the information isn’t mishandled. Proper data management often leads to fines, so it’s helpful that Five9 has built-in tools to assist companies and their partners become compliant.

In addition to HIPAA-compliance, Five9 also provides compliances for:

• The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)
• The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

With so many regulatory compliances, Five9 provides a very secure means of managing customer data. In addition to this, the provider also has call monitoring, call barge, international calling, and several types of dialers to support your agents. It does all this with a user-friendly interface and a wealth of prebuilt integrations with popular solutions, such as Slack and Salesforce.

Additionally, Five9 announced a partnership with Nextiva in June 2021. This partnership grants users of both Nextiva and Five9 platforms access to the UCaaS/CCaaS features of each. As a result, users can combine team collaboration features through Nextiva solutions, like CoSpace, with the Intelligent Cloud Contact Center features of the other provider.

It’s worth noting that Five9 doesn’t have the legendary “five nines” uptime reliability of 99.999%. Instead, you can expect a 99.994% uptime for the service with the provider. In a month, this amounts to about three minutes of potential downtime, and in a year, this would be a seemingly inconsequential 31 minutes of total service unavailability.

Some providers, like RingCentral, provide 99.999% uptime SLAs, which cuts yearly downtime to about five minutes and Talkdesk’s 100% SLA at the Elite plan level eliminates it entirely. Others, like CloudTalk, have 99.99% uptime guarantees, which almost double the potential downtime of Five9. Take a look at our Five9 review to determine if it fits your business needs.

Five9 Features

• Workforce optimization: With Five9, you can automatically adjust agent schedules, verify that agents adhere to them, predict future contact volumes using artificial intelligence (AI), and plan for special events. The call center system even has gamification features to help promote competition (and thus improve performance) amongst agents.
• Artificial intelligence: There are several ways that Five9 leverages AI to increase contact center effectiveness. First, it employs conversational AI to engage with customers via the IVR system. It also uses an AI solution to transcribe calls, summarize conversations, and provide real-time guidance for your agents. Finally, the system helps users create voice-overs using AI that uses up to 25 natural-sounding voices.
• Powerful auto-dialers: As we covered in our predictive dialer piece, this type of dialer is excellent for call centers with higher call volumes. Five9 has both progressive and predictive auto-dialing modes, so if you’re dialing from a pre-existing list of contacts, then you have some effective tools.

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How We Evaluated the Best Call Center Phone Systems

Call center systems provide even small businesses with an option for extended customer contact. The best systems increase efficiency, provide agents with dialing automation, and make it easy to monitor all contact points. The providers we analyzed in this guide all have a lot to offer, and each offers unique features that might make it the best call center phone system for your company.

With a score of 4.46 out of 5, Freshdesk Contact Center is our top pick as the best call center system for small businesses. While it only has a 99.97% uptime, it still maintains HIPAA compliance, has numbers in several international territories, and has important CCaaS features, like IVR, ACD, and call monitoring.

It also offers a free version for smaller businesses with less frequent outbound and inbound contact center needs. Find out if Freshdesk Contact Center works for your team by checking it out on its 21-day trial.

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Bottom Line

Finding a competitive CCaaS solution is important, and it’s a fairly crowded market of providers. It’s more than just auto-dialers and hotdesking—you’ll need to look at aspects like service uptime and agent support tools. The providers we reviewed here provide a great start and have enough features to work for most small businesses.