Aircall vs. HCL Sametime

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.

Incentivized

Sametime is well suited for very quick conversations, where you know the person is an active Sametime user. It also serves as an easy way to reach out to someone you may not know when looking for an answer to a quick question, as they are likely to be a Sametime user. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use Sametime for Audio or Video chat. The quality and reliability are horrendous.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sametime's web-based interfaces are "zero load", requiring no plug-ins to be installed to join a meeting, launch a meeting, or use chat in a browser. A plugin is required only if you want to share your screen.
• Integration with IBM Notes is very tight. Sametime's chat status can change according to your Notes calendar. You can easily see if someone who just emailed you is available to chat. Your chat History is right inside Notes as well.
• IBM's mobile apps are top notch. We automated the apps for our users thanks to IBM's work with third party MDMs. This made it very simple for us to deploy the Sametime mobile apps -- Chat and Meetings -- and get new capabilities such as Audio & Video mobilized quickly.
• No down time, ever. The rock solid WebSphere back-end of Sametime means the environment is always up. Period.

Incentivized

• No schedule for bank holidays
• 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

Incentivized

• Not convenient for a large group meeting.
• Very basic tool for internal communication only not available for third party communication
• Very basic and limited mobile app features.
• High speed connection is needed to connect to Sametime

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.

Incentivized

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.

Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.

Incentivized

Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.

Incentivized

Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have not needed to use the Sametime support team. Our local support team was able to configure it for me.

Incentivized

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 use Jabber globally in our company and Symphony (no relevant app in able list) in some of the teams as well. All these are instant messenger tools, but Sametime is the easiest one to be used and its chat history is easy to be searched. Sametime can be used to contact almost all internal staff as it’s included in default computer package. Symphony is used to chat with front end business while Jabber is used for call.

Incentivized

Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Sametime keeps many of our team members in contact throughout the day which leads to increased productivity which makes everyone happy.
• We use the team chat room feature every day. This allows a team to stay focused on the task without any extra messages that are not on topic.
• The split between IBM Sametime, Slack and Google Hangouts has caused some issues when team members are not checking for messages on a certain app.

Incentivized