Aircall headquartered in Paris provides a VOIP system for business designed to support contact centers, featuring IVR and automated call routing, conference calls, shared call inbox and call notes, unlimited concurrent calls and call queuing, and many integrations with CRM or marketing systems to support a variety of support or sales purposes.
Call Manager is a unified call control center from Cisco that supports enterprise collaboration functions across the spectrum of IP telephony, video & web conferencing, and messaging. Features include call forwarding, call back, call transfer, ad hoc conferencing, and call park.
Aircall is a great fit for any SaaS organization for sales and support groups. Since I come from sales, I cannot talk about support, but for the sales team, it's a great help. It's intuitive and user-friendly. No need for formal training as it's very easy to access all the features you need. I particularly like the option of taking calls on my mobile phone while I am away from my desk or traveling, and also how I can easily manage my working hours and schedule. I also like its ability to interact with different CRMs and other useful tools like Slack, etc.
Cisco Unified Communications Manager is suited for medium to large customers who are in search for a solid call control platform with added security in mind. Cisco Unified Communications Manager also supports receptions, small groups and also a mini contact center type of set up with its Hunt Group, Pick up Group and call queuing facilities and also with set up of music on hold function while calls queuing.
Aircall's integration with HubSpot is fantastic. I can call from anywhere in HubSpot and know that my call is logged automatically. During my call, I have easy access to a contact's record and can pull up any information I need in just the click of a button. The only limit I've found is that it doesn't (yet?) auto-log to tickets. This seems to be pretty common among other integrations so it wasn't seen as a con in our buying decision.
I really like the Aircall dashboard and being able to customize who has access to what number. We even have the ability to give outbound calling privileges only to certain team members. It's also great that you can set up each individual number's answer tree to ring to the correct person.
There's a lot of cool features that don't make sense for our particular business, but I think Aircall's metric tracking and coaching abilities would be really useful for a lot of teams. I remember in my first call hearing about a feature where a manager can listen in and "whisper" tips to a rep during a call that only the rep would be able to hear. I can see how this would add value in a coaching situation.
No feature to update more than one phone line at the same time
Admins don't have access to the timeline of a call to see with which agent it rang
Missing agent-specific stats when your phone lines are organized in teams
If calls are setup to ring to a first group and then a second, if the whole first group is already busy, it does not go to the second group but puts the customer on hold
I give this rating as aircall is very easy to use but also lacks a parallel dialing feature which makes it slower to use. aircall has a pretty seamless integration with salesforce which is helpful. For the cost it is definitely very reasonable but it also lacks a live coaching/listening feature which is very valuable as a manager.
I provide this rating based on my overall experience using Aircall. I have used it on my previous company as well and that being said, it is a proof that Aircall is a great tool to use in contact centers and with B2B businesses that has direct communication with clients.
The usability part of Cisco Unified Communications Manager is very much simple from a usability point of view. Day-to-day Move Add Change Delete (MACD) can be performed by the administrators very easily with simple training. From the initial deployment point of view, some of the thing can be improved to simplify the process.
We've enjoyed using Aircall so far and have had no issues with it. The platform is easy to use, looks nice, and makes it easy to keep track of everything.
CUCM is supported by most third-party vendors for related products, so it makes finding solutions to specific needs easy. Also Cisco TAC is very knowledgeable, and we have never run into a problem they have not been able to resolve. Usually they are resolved without the need to escalate tickers either.
We used to answer phone calls on our fix line when at the office. The quality was very bad but we had in mind that a VOIP solution would be too expensive. When lockdown began last year, I had to redirect calls on my own mobile phone which was not efficient. Also I couldn't receive voicemails, have a history of calls or choose working hours.
We have been a Cisco based shop and have looked at other cloud voice options such as MS Teams pbx, and others, but ultimately, the features, endpoints, and reliability of Cisco has been the common factor in staying with them as our voice provider. Their integrations, room systems, and hybrid design allows for us to be flexible and keep a high up time vs reliance on 100% cloud.
Because of the lack of local partnerships with South African telecoms companies, calls to South Africa is very expensive. This was not originally apparent when opening the Aircall account.
Not having the option to display a local South African number in the CLIP, means that people are not always eager to pick up the phone when they see an overseas number ringing.
The only positive impact has been the collaborative experience and being able to maintain a virtual office
