Cyprus based company 3CX offers an IP PBX phone system.
$1.08
per user/per month
Lifesize CxEngage
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
CxEngage is a cloud contact center solution designed to meet users' needs and
work in their environment. Unlike monolithic architectures and on-premises
solutions, CxEngage is a ‘born-in-the-cloud’ platform to deliver unified visibility
across voice, video, and digital channels. CxEngage is designed to just work
anywhere, and to be implemented in a few days or weeks.
$85
per month per user
Pricing
3CX
Lifesize CxEngage
Editions & Modules
Pro
$1.08
per user/per month
Enterprise
$1.31
per user/per month
Standard
Free
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
3CX
Lifesize CxEngage
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
Price displayed is based on 25 users.
3CX pricing is based on the number of simultaneous calls your business requires or in other words, how many calls your system needs to support at once. Unlike other PBX vendors there is no per extension cost.
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.
CxEngage can handle some more complex flow options that other vendors don't seem to be able to do. The integration for voice calls with Salesforce is a huge plus. The integration of email support with Salesforce is a BIG miss. After fighting with it for a year, we finally just turned it off and use Salesforce Omnichannel for email support. Chat using Salesforce Live Agent worked fine enough.
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.
Stronger support and more reliable system for users not on a commercial network
Consumer friendly and intuitive reporting and dashboard tools. build canned reports
Reporting: Ability to get a combined SVL for all queues included on a report (now we manually calculate after exporting the report into excel). Same for all major data points (ASA, AHT, etc.)
Ability to include abandoned calls and an abandonment percentage which excludes short abandons on the Queue summary report. Now the report just shows total abandons and abandonment percentage so if we want to exclude short abandons we have to pull a separate report to find out how many calls abandoned in less than 10 seconds then calculate the "true abandoned number" (calls abandoned minus short abandons)
Ability to change what is considered a "short abandon" and then report on it. Right now the only option is the built in tracking of calls that abandoned in equal to or less than 10 seconds.
Ability to "save" an agents "default" skill profile so that any changes we make can be returned to "BAU" with a click of a button
quicker data/historical report retrieval
way to separate what we have listed as a queue name for reporting vs. what is used for the queue name in the "whisper" (the issue we had with WT queue naming conventions because we had to have the whisper be super precise)
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.
We implemented in 2018 and were only given 8 weeks to do it...as per the direction of our parent company at the time. Serenova at the time responded well and we were able to go Live within 8-weeks...albeit the product overall was a big change and had gaps in features over our previous contact management solution.
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
It's been too many years...I don't remember. Except in 2021 we looked briefly at Amazon and Salesforce call center offerings. Both were too basic at the time that even if we got a great deal on licensing (we are a Salesforce house for other things), we couldn't easily (or at all) do things like Callbacks and some of the more robust flow buildouts that we have in place today with Lifesize.
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.
