3CX vs. Zoom Contact Center

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.

Incentivized

The Contact Centre is fantastic for our festival environment; these systems are rarely accessible to an arts organisation without a significant premium. However, that's not the case with Zoom Contact Centre. It may be tricky initially if you don't have an IT Company to help you with the integration, but they have a great Professional Services Team (PSO) to guide you through the process. Be prepared for the transition to take a few months; I wouldn't recommend it if you need something set up today. Moving phone numbers from other Telcos takes time, and the PSO can provide a custom solution that takes time to develop.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to change behavior of a call queue
• Easy to modify call flow (normally this is very difficult and cumbersome in other contact centers)
• Language that is not esoteric to phone technicians (e.g., no "Hunt Group" or other inside baseball terms)
• Easy to see the overview of what is currently going on in the phone system and what people are doing right now
• Easy to add licenese, change changes, add phone numbers, change p#s, etc.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Go deeper into a true separation of parameters, reporting, management, etc. so you could have multiple business units with very different needs, independently work. Some sort of "Multi-Tenant-Like" capabilities like the one seen in Zoom Phone Locations. In situations like these where you need "location/team isolation" is challenging, if not impossible to implement with Zoom Contact Center.
• More pre-canned integrations and ready-to-go examples to implement thins like the "InApp-Chat" channel for the Zoom Client Itself. This could be a great addition, especially when you use the ZCC to service your own company.
• ZCC is meant to be an independent solution that could interact with Zoom and non-Zoom products, but the capability to allow a tight-integration with Zoom Phone is really missing: Having the capability to make/receive calls between ZP and ZCC using just extension numbers should have been a given from the get-go; it really limits the use cases of Zoom Contact Center with its other star product Zoom Phone. I heard something is coming to address this, for lack of a better word I call "shortcoming", so I am really looking forward to see what is "being cooked" on this regard.
• Licensing Tiers: ZCC is really missing an Admin-Only Role from the licensing perspective; you have to "waste" a license to add Administrators, which is particularly bad when you have a fairly large organization with multiple admins.

First and foremost for our results, the omnichannel approach and ease of use on the internal side (agents, supervisors and administrators) have made adoption very simple, we have managed to reduce response times (SLA) and internal communication has become very fluid. We get good feedback from our clients for having implemented ZCC in the company to serve them.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

There are options and ways to get to specific feature sets that are similar to what Zoom can offer. Many of the Zoom included features are add-ons for the RingCentral offering. So cost goes up and can also be an add-on difficulties/deployment costs as well. When we reviewed the features needed and the cost comparison, Zoom was less than half the cost with many of the features baked in as opposed to add-ons

• 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.

Incentivized

• We migrated away from a telephony system that was antiquated and almost unusable for what we wanted to do, so Zoom has been a huge improvement for us!
• We're continuing to roll out new channels of contact for customers -- Calls, chat, video, email, etc.
• We're still getting our sea legs from a reporting perspective, and that could always be better, but so far the biggest improvement was for our staff actually using the software. They really enjoy the simplicity and robustness of the software.