The best call center phone systems offer robust call management capabilities, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and call queues. They feature different outbound dialing modes, helping teams be more efficient in customer outreach. The workforce management tools enable businesses to forecast staffing needs and ensure enough agents are available to accommodate the volume of customer inquiries.
Moreover, the best call center phone systems integrate with various third-party business tools, allowing companies to add calling capabilities to their existing tech stack. Based on our research, the following software solutions are the best platforms for handling customer calls:
- RingCentral Contact Center: Best overall for inbound and outbound call management
- Zoom Contact Center: Best for analytics
- Dialpad Ai Contact Center: Best for artificial intelligence-powered productivity
- Nextiva Contact Center: Best for workflow automation
- Aircall: Best for third-party integrations
- CloudTalk: Best for call routing
Best Call Center Phone Systems Compared
Software | Monthly Starting Price (per User) | Key Features | FSB Rating out of 5 |
---|---|---|---|
| 4.68 out of 5 | ||
| 4.66 out of 5 | ||
| 4.60 out of 5 | ||
Custom pricing |
| 4.55 out of 5 | |
| 4.29 out of 5 | ||
Caller-based routing Preferred agent routing VIP call queues | 4.28 out of 5 | ||
RingCentral Contact Center: Best for Inbound & Outbound Call Management
What We Liked
- Unlimited domestic calling minutes
- Robust call management and workforce engagement tools
- Integrates natively with business phone RingCentral MVP
Where It Falls Behind
- No monthly billing option for RingCX
- Outbound dialers require an extra fee
- Highest-tier subscription plan only includes 40 integrations
RingCentral Contact Center Monthly Pricing
- RingCX*: $65 per agent for ACD, IVR, call recording, real-time and historical reports, and native integration with RingCentral MVP
- RingCentral Contact Center Enterprise: Custom pricing for advanced IVR, omnichannel interaction designer, advanced quality management, native workforce management, and performance management
*Pricing is for annual billing. Monthly billing isn’t available.
RingCentral Contact Center ranks first in our list of the best call center phone systems, offering a wide range of call center features that facilitate better handling of inbound and outbound calls. It intelligently distributes calls to agents through various routing modes:
- Skills-based routing assigns calls to agents based on the skill set relevant to the customer’s need.
- IVR routing sends callers to their chosen departments and facilitates self-service.
- Data-driven routing pulls data from back-end and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to match customers to the right service representatives.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) digital routing processes message intent and human language to distribute inquiries to relevant agents.
On top of the robust routing system, RingCentral Contact Center features powerful outbound dialing modes. It allows you to run customer outreach campaigns efficiently with preview, predictive, and progressive dialers. Its outbound dialing features are robust, earning it a spot in our list of best progressive dialer software providers.
While RingCentral is our top choice among the best call center phone systems, it falls short on pricing, as it doesn’t have the flexibility of choosing a monthly billing option. Other software providers, like Aircall and Dialpad, offer this option for businesses that don’t want to be tied to a long-term subscription.
RingCentral Contact Center Features
- Call deflection: Divert incoming calls to an alternate customer service channel, such as messaging. With this, customers will get faster customer service and won’t have to wait long in the queue.
- Compliance risk mitigation: Ensure outgoing calls are sent out during authorized time windows. RingCentral lets users comply with Do Not Call requests at all times.
- Scripting: Create clear, effective spiels for customer service and sales. By making your messaging uniform and professional across all agents, you establish credibility among customers.
Zoom Contact Center: Best for Analytics
What We Liked
- Real-time transcription helps agents understand customers better
- Supports Personal Identifiable Information (PII) redaction
- Easy call routing configuration with the Flow Editor
Where It Falls Behind
- Only integrates with five third-party apps
- Users must upgrade to the highest-tier plan to access quality and workforce management tools
- Virtual agent requires an extra fee
Zoom Contact Center Monthly Pricing*
- Essentials: $69 per user for IVR, real-time transcription, customizable surveys, AI Companion, and remote control
- Premium: $99 per user for outbound dialers and access to email and social channels
- Elite: $149 per user for quality management, workforce management, and advanced AI (personalized recommendations for better call management)
*Pricing is for monthly billing.
Zoom Contact Center is a top call center phone system, offering robust analytics that show critical call center metrics, including service level, average call handling times, and call volume counts. The performance insights further drill down into specific queues and agents.
Under the Queue Monitor tab, you’ll find the following metrics: number of active calls, live waiting calls, talking calls, and calls on hold. In the Agent Monitor tab, you’ll see the number of active calls of each agent, number of active calls an agent placed on hold, status duration, and queues the agent is a member of and whether they’ve enabled or disabled queue notifications.
The best part about Zoom’s analytics is the ability to customize the dashboard and readily display the metrics that matter to your business. The customization feature extends to thresholds for Service Level, as you can set the critical threshold and the associated colors for statuses. For example, you’ll see the statistic in red when you go below the preset threshold.
While Zoom is a great phone system for call center teams, note that it only integrates with five third-party solutions. Aircall is a better option if you rely on external CRM apps for your sales and customer service efforts.
Zoom Contact Center Features
- Active engagements: Get an overview of all the live conversations on the contact center system. Aside from phone calls, you’ll see customer interactions happening in other channels, such as video, chat, and short messaging service (SMS).
- Journey: When you accept an incoming call, the call center system shows you the list of the caller’s previous touchpoints. You’ll see the names of agents or the phone numbers they’ve talked to in the past, providing you with a much better context of the customer’s concern.
- Caller checkmark icon: This tool appears if the carrier considers the caller as an authorized party for using the phone number. This allows agents to quickly recognize and avoid spam calls that negatively impact productivity.
Dialpad Ai Contact Center: Best for AI-powered Productivity
What We Liked
- Intuitive, visually appealing interface
- Offers 100% uptime guarantee
- In-queue callback and call recording tools are available in all subscription plans
Where It Falls Behind
- Expensive subscription plans
- Integrates with less than 35 third-party apps
- Users must connect the platform to Playvox to have a workforce management solution
Dialpad Ai Contact Center Monthly Pricing*
- Essentials: $95 per user for IVR, ACD, in-queue callback, call recording, and third-party integrations
- Advanced: $135 per user for real-time assist, custom moments, and access to a single digital channel
- Premium: $170 per user for access to all digital channels, AI scorecards, and AI CSAT score
*Pay only $80, $115, and $150 per user for the tiered subscription plans when you choose annual billing.
Dialpad is a cloud-based call center phone system suitable for companies wanting to boost agent productivity through AI. Its Real-time Assist (RTA) cards show pre-programmed responses to specific customer concerns, helping agents answer accurately and professionally. Real-time speech coaching, on the other hand, offers recommendations for improving communication, such as speaking slower for message clarity.
Aside from empowering agents, Dialpad’s AI offers meaningful insights about customer satisfaction. It analyzes conversations and evaluates customer sentiment in real time. It automatically generates a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) even without you asking customers to fill out surveys.
On top of that, quality assurance reviews become more efficient as Dialpad AI automatically suggests performance grades based on preset criteria. This reduces the need to manually review calls. Although Dialpad is a great platform, you must connect the platform to Playvox to access workforce management. If you want a native tool, explore other cloud-based call center phone systems like RingCentral Contact Center and Nextiva Contact Center.
Dialpad Ai Contact Center Features
- Call barge: When you need to address customer concerns directly, use call barge to join a live call between an agent and a caller. This tool is useful for de-escalating tense situations between call participants. If you’re interested in exploring other solutions with call barge, read our comprehensive guide on the best call monitoring software.
- Company dictionary: Teach the phone system’s AI to understand words you typically use in call center activities by adding keywords to the dictionary. These may include competitor names, industry terms, and acronyms. With a comprehensive dictionary, you’ll get more accurate call transcriptions.
- Call transcription: Be fully present during customer conversations as the phone system takes over taking down notes of the call. The transcription is displayed on the agent’s screen in real time.
Nextiva Contact Center: Best for Workflow Automation
What We Liked
- Comprehensive workforce optimization tools, which include scorecards and coaching
- Integrates seamlessly with Nextiva's unified communications platform
- 24/7 support is available across all plans
Where It Falls Behind
- Lacks transparency in pricing
- Limited third-party integrations
- Intelligent virtual agent is available as an add-on only
Nextiva Contact Center Monthly Pricing
- Core: Custom pricing for blended inbound and outbound communications, geo-redundancy, and call recording
- Premium: Custom pricing for access to digital channels (chat, email, and SMS) and essentials quality management
- Optimum: Custom pricing for enterprise quality management, enterprise workforce management, proactive notification
- Ultimate: Custom pricing for interaction analytics and entire workflow automation suite
Among the listed phone systems for call centers here, Nextiva Contact Center is our recommended solution for those wanting to automate workflows and make routine call center activities more efficient. It eliminates the manual work of sending updates and reminders to customers not only via phone, but also SMS, email, and social channels. Moreover, it comes with prebuilt integrations that automate tasks in connected apps, like customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
The downside of choosing this VoIP call center phone system is that its virtual agent requires an extra fee. It doesn’t help that the subscription plan fees aren’t readily available on the provider’s website. On Dialpad Contact Center, the virtual agent is available in its second-tier package, which costs $135 per user, monthly.
Nextiva Contact Center Features
- Interactions analytics: Evaluate customer sentiment and agent actions to recalibrate communication strategies. Note that this feature is exclusively offered in the most expensive plan.
- Performance dashboard: Check call center metrics to gauge the efficiency of your operations. Nextiva reports the number of calls in queue, abandoned calls, and average call and idle times in real time.
- Call recording: Capture conversations between service representatives and customers to evaluate how you can improve services. Share these with agents during coaching and training sessions.
Aircall: Best for Third-party Integrations
What We Liked
- Offers a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% uptime
- Easy to use thanks to its highly intuitive interface
- Unlimited international calls in the most expensive plan
Where It Falls Behind
- Requires a minimum number of users, 25 on the most expensive package
- Conference call only hosts up to five participants
- Call analytics history is limited to the last six months only
Aircall Monthly Pricing*
- Essentials: $40 per user for IVR, call queue, call recording, conference call, and standard analytics
- Professional: $70 per user for queue callback, call monitoring, standard and advanced analytics, and power dialer
- Custom: Custom pricing for access to API developer support, single sign-on, and unlimited outbound international calls
- Free trial: 7 days
*Pricing is for monthly billing. This option is only available for businesses getting a minimum of four licenses. Save 25% by paying annually. Annual billing requires a minimum of three licenses.
Aircall is the ideal call center phone system software for teams that regularly use other business apps for sales and customer service operations. It natively integrates with over 100 platforms, including CRM tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive, and monday.com CRM. By connecting these apps to the call center platform, you don’t have to switch between apps to refer to customer profiles or record new leads.
The best part about Aircall is it offers a public API, allowing you to add Aircall functionalities to your business app. Unfortunately, the provider only allows a maximum of five participants in a conference call. If you frequently host meetings with a large group of clients, it’s better to explore other top call center phone systems. RingCentral Contact Center, through its integration with its VoIP phone system, lets users host up to 1,000 attendees.
Aircall Features
- Warm transfer: Before moving a call to another team member, talk to the colleague first and inform them about the customer inquiry. While consulting with another agent, the customer is put on hold.
- Pause-resume recording: Pause and resume call recordings manually to ensure private information remains confidential. This is useful for concealing sensitive data like bank accounts or credit card details.
- Parallel calls: When you’re in an active phone call, it’s possible to dial another phone number and start a second call. Use this valuable feature when confirming important information with colleagues.
CloudTalk: Best for Call Routing
What We Liked
- Intuitive call flow designer
- Local phone numbers in over 160 countries
- Keeps call participants’ personal information private with the call masking feature
Where It Falls Behind
- Doesn’t offer a monthly billing option and discounts for bulk users
- Entry-level plan doesn’t have business hours call routing
- Uptime guarantee is locked behind the most expensive subscription plan
CloudTalk Monthly Pricing*
- Starter: $25 per user for toll-free numbers, ACD, call flow designer, call recording, and ring groups
- Essential: $30 per user for IVR, business hours call routing, skills-based routing, personalized greetings and music, and callback
- Expert: $50 per user for VIP queues, mandatory call tagging, smart and power dialers, and integration with Salesforce
- Custom: Custom pricing for custom reporting, flat rates for unlimited outbound calls, and SLA
- Free trial: 14 days
*Pricing is for annual billing. Monthly billing isn’t available.
CloudTalk is the best call center platform for those strictly offering voice support to customers and would want to improve call routing efficiency. Aside from the standard ACD and IVR tools, it has caller-based routing, which lets you send inbound calls to specific agents based on the caller’s phone number and preconfigured criteria.
Similarly, the preferred agent routing enables you to assign a specific service representative for a client. As agents become more familiar with customer needs, they’re able to provide personalized service. Additionally, you have the option to create VIP queues for your most valuable clients. Place VIP tags on their phone numbers so the system can automatically put them in front of the queue.
However, one disadvantage you must know before choosing CloudTalk is that outbound calls are charged per minute. In contrast, our top software solution RingCentral Contact Center offers unlimited domestic inbound and manual outbound minutes, helping manage communication costs better.
CloudTalk Features
- Call tagging: Place appropriate labels on calls depending on the type of customer concerns you get, like technical support, customer complaints, or order or delivery status. By organizing customer interactions, you’ll understand callers better and spot trends and opportunities for improvement in your service.
- After-call work: When a call ends, the agent sees a dialog box that lets them rate the customer’s mood and call quality. An input field for call notes is likewise available.
- Automated call redirection: Send calls automatically to a preconfigured phone number when agents are busy or unavailable during business hours. This ensures you won’t miss any important client calls and that customers get the timely assistance they need.
How We Evaluated the Best Call Center Phone Systems
To objectively assess call center solutions, we created a scoring guide that takes into account small businesses’ priorities when comparing phone systems, namely subscription rates, call management capabilities, user-friendliness, and customer care. We included our evaluation of the providers’ popularity and value for money.
Learn how we evaluated the best call center phone systems by clicking on the tabs below:
10% of Overall Score
To gauge the platform’s affordability, we compared the cost of the base plan that features call center tools to the prevailing market rate. We gave more points to those offering annual and volume user discounts.
30% of Overall Score
Since businesses need a reliable phone solution, part of the general features we evaluated is the uptime guarantee, favoring those with 99.999% SLA. Other capabilities we looked at were IVR, integration with CRM tools, and call barge. Those offering monitoring analytics without extra fees earned more points.
20% of Overall Score
The advanced features we considered were on-hold music and speech analytics. We favored providers offering robust tools for evaluating agent performance. We also checked if the platforms are compliant with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards.
10% of Overall Score
The providers with highly intuitive interfaces facilitating easy navigation within the platform earned more points in our rubric. We determined the learning curve for operating the system, as well as the level of technical skill required to set it up.
10% of Overall Score
As companies require timely assistance for technical concerns, we considered the customer service hours of each provider. The kinds of communication channels were likewise a priority, giving more points to vendors with phone, email, and live chat support.
20% of Overall Score
This includes our assessment of each provider’s value for money, ease of use, and standout features. We considered the popularity of the platforms among professionals by referring to third-party review websites and taking into account user ratings.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Call center platforms come in different types, catering to different communication needs and business goals. Before settling on a particular platform, familiarize yourself with these call center phone solutions:
- Inbound call center: The software primarily accepts and manages incoming calls. It’s ideal for businesses offering customer service, tech support, order processing, and loyalty programs. Common features you’ll find in an inbound call center are ACD, skills-based routing, and IVR.
- Outbound call center: This type of platform focuses on letting teams reach out to clients more efficiently. It suits companies executing sales and marketing campaigns, such as lead generation, payment collection, and audience research. Auto-dialers are the main features of outbound call centers.
- Blended call center: This combines the functions of an inbound and outbound call center. Thus, it’s best for companies aiming to provide excellent customer service and streamline sales and marketing efforts.
- Omnichannel contact center: Aside from phone calls, the software lets users manage customer communications across different channels, including SMS, email, and social media. It’s great for organizations wanting to interact with customers in multiple channels using only one platform. If you want to explore different software solutions, check out our comprehensive guide on the best omnichannel contact center software.
Good call center software matches your communication requirements. When choosing among options, consider these aspects:
- Features: Your team’s needs and goals dictate which features to look for. For example, if you aim to reach as many clients as possible in a short period, then you should prioritize software with robust auto-dialers. If you frequently handle large call volumes, go for phone solutions with call queues that accommodate multiple calls.
- Integrations: Call center software that integrates seamlessly with other business apps makes handling calls easier and more efficient. Find one that connects with frequently used tools like CRM, help desk, and productivity solutions.
- Customer support: A good call center software vendor has multiple lines for technical assistance. Aside from an online help center and a community forum, your provider must offer phone, email, and chat support, ideally available 24/7.
In an inbound call center phone system, the process involves these steps:
- A customer dials a business phone number and gets connected.
- The IVR greets the customer with a menu of options, including which department they want to reach.
- After selecting from the menu through key presses or their voice, the call center phone system distributes the customer to the right department.
- An agent from the department picks up the call. On their end, they have access to the customer profile, providing key information that helps resolve customer concerns.
- Once the agent resolves the customer concern, the system sends a customer satisfaction survey.
Bottom Line
The best call center phone solutions have a wide array of tools for managing incoming calls and supporting outgoing call campaigns for different teams. They have powerful analytics that enable businesses to identify trends in customer concerns and adjust communication strategies. Among the platforms we reviewed, RingCentral Contact Center emerges as the top solution, as it offers robust tools supporting streamlined inbound and outbound call management.
It’s equipped with a comprehensive, intelligent routing system that enables teams to handle a huge volume of incoming calls efficiently. The range of outbound dialers helps in various types of customer outreach efforts, be it lead generation, sales, or customer surveys. Subscribe to RingCentral Contact Center today.