Likelihood to Recommend In many scenarios decision is driven by budget and compared to other solutions at the time of purchase [3CX] was simply the cheapest solution for what it has to offer. If you are looking for integrations, extensibility, and advanced functionalities, this might not be a solution for you. At the time of use (and this may have changed by now), there was a lack of APIs, CLI commands, and similar so nothing could be automated with the system. There are ways of importing data through CSV but automation would solve us so much time and support calls if we were able to connect with other systems.
Read full review Bright Pattern has been fantastic in allowing us to automate voice and chat contacts, and we're currently building out scenarios that will allow us to automate even more. It's super simple to collect data from customers, and using some API calls provides the answers they're looking for without a human needing to get involved. There is less functionality currently for emails. Emails can be routed to queues based on keywords, and auto-replies can be sent, but it's pretty basic functionality. We'd love to see some of the enhanced capabilities offered in voice and chat scenarios for email.
Read full review Pros Simplicity: Using a single 3CX interface we can manage every phone and extension used throughout our company. Flexibility: There are a wide variety of options to configure each extension and phone. Changing anything after the hardware is deployed is very easy. Portability: Phones with 3CX can be easily moved or repurposed within an office or at remote locations, including users' homes. The mobile app allows users to use their office extension anywhere without exposing their cell number. Read full review AI platform integration - IBM Watson, Google Dialogflow, for example Quality Management - out of the box sentiment anlysis Unified agent desktop - ability to see all channels in one pane of glass Robust analytic widgets that can also drive wall boards Read full review Cons I would like to be able to see direct-dial numbers on the handsets. Currently that is not possible but that would be a nice feature. You need an SBC per location, which can be a point of failure. You also need a server that might get disconnected, which is another point of failure. Read full review More customizable and robust out of the box reporting WFM component Easier/cleaner Chat GPT integration for generative AI agent responses and notes Read full review Usability It's pretty simple for agents to pick up quickly, it takes a bit longer for supervisors to get familiar with. QA tools are pretty barebones but functional enough. It can be as simple or complex as you need it to be, if you spend some time configuring the settings or working with Bright Pattern's support team to build out what you need.
Read full review Reliability and Availability It is always on. The only outage to date that I have experienced was with an upstream telco provider a few years ago. The inbound leg telco was hit by a DDOS attack which led to delays in routing calls to the platform. This was not the fault of the Bright Pattern platform but the telco provider. We have had a few minor carrier issues with call quality, or a handful of brief drops, but Bright Pattern is quick to identify these and change carriers when it starts to happen.
Read full review Performance All pages load when expected, and reports render either in the web browser or as a download. I never really have issues with accessing the admin or agent desktop sites. It just works.
Read full review Support Rating The 3CX Phone System is only a five because while they provide set-up/how-to/Q and A documents to help your district or company get started, they do not offer support for free. The documents provided, though, are good enough for you to get you up and running. We also found a good source of help through a sip trunk provider, which was a 3CX reseller provider.
Read full review Although we have only had 1 very short outage in our 4 years of service. Bright Pattern support was easy to contact and solved our sisue very quickly as well as provided more than adequate information on an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) for our clients
Read full review In-Person Training In-person and virtual training was great, but Bright Pattern could use some online training videos similar to other platforms. I would welcome online training videos to keep the steady flow of new agents up to date. Admin training is one of the largest areas that need video. The static documentation is great. It is pretty easy to follow and configure your contact center as you progress through each step. The documentation is available online on an easy to use knowledgebase or wiki style site. You do not need a user account to access the help docs, meaning that users at any level can freely access the materials to learn about the platform.
Read full review Online Training Online training is documentation based only. It is thorough and step by step, but no videos. It would also be helpful to have more information within the help docs on custom reporting. I find that many of the Bright Pattern specific configurations for the Jasper Reporting Server have to be "stumbled" across through existing report templates and they are not clearly listed out somewhere. In person training will not generally go into great depth on report customizations.
Read full review Implementation Rating As an implementor, I have found the Bright Pattern Contact Center very easy to work with. The platform operates in the manner which I think. Therefore, everything I do seems logical and works exactly as expected. Many solutions are much more difficult to work with and make implementations difficult
Read full review Alternatives Considered The main differences between 8x8, Inc. and 3CX is pricing and ease of use in my opinion. The 3CX system uses annual based pricing plans based on of simultaneous calls your company needs, not the number of extensions/users and offers a free plan. 8x8, Inc. charges per extension with different plans. We currently have 19 extensions so the 3CX system makes more sense for us, however, if your company only has a few extensions you may want to throughly consider both options. In my experience, it was difficult to add new extensions and phones with 8x8 because at least at that time we had 8x8 I could not add anything on the web admin. I had to call a sales rep which took a lot more time. Also, if you didn't purchase a phone and/or headset directly from 8x8 at a usually higher price than Amazon for example then you would have to spend anywhere from 30 minutes to hours on the phone with 8x8 tech support to program the phone to work with the 8x8 system so adding a new extension could turn into a long ordeal. I can easily add new extensions on 3CX directly in the web cpanel. Granted, if you are actually adding a new phone number you would need to purchase that number from a company like ATT first before adding it to 3CX. The difference between a phone number and an extension would be a phone number allows a customer to call in directly using that number. The extension would require the customer to call the main business number then be transferred to the extension. 3CX provides a list of supported phone models on their website
Read full review As a contact centre technology vendor we have experience of many different contact centre platforms. We chose Bright Pattern Contact Center because its the best omni-channel contact centre we've ever seen, it's incredibly reliable, its hosted in-country, it has the Microsoft integrations many of our customers want, we can integrate with virtually any CRM or ITSM system and the platform offers a vast feature set.
Read full review Scalability Very flexible and will scale without any intervention from my team. Scaling at the carrier/telco layer is handled by Bright Pattern, if you use their offered telecom
Read full review Return on Investment 3CX has a lot to offer for a very low cost as its business model is based on simultaneous calls and not per device. It's very cost effective and very affordable. As the 3CX server does not require a high-performance server to run, with the Public Cloud option, it might allow even further savings. Read full review We saved customers between 30% - 40% of the cost of their current omnichannel contact center solutions when we implemented Bright Pattern Contact Center Very quick to implement so we are able to service more customers with same number of staff Read full review ScreenShots Bright Pattern Contact Center Screenshots