CallFire vs. Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager)

If you need to find a test candidate for your client quickly, this is one of the best ways. Pull yourself a hot list of a couple hundred potential candidates and load them in to CallFire. Then get ready to hit about 50-60 calls per hour. You should have a great test candidate for your client in about 24 hours! It's amazing how quickly you can show your clients the true speed of your company.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• CallFire provides detailed analytics that show what/when callers select within the phone system
• The text message broadcast feature is a game changer. This allows a company to dispatch text campaigns with specific calls-to-action, with tracking analytics.
• The voice broadcast feature allows a mass automated message to be sent to client phones. This saves a lot of time when the same notification needs to go out to multiple clients.

Incentivized

• This solution is extremely stable and has been running in our environment for several years without (unscheduled) downtime.
• The ability to have voicemails automatically sent as an email message is extremely helpful in helping us to keep in touch while away from the desk.
• The Call Manager provides us very granular settings to route our calls as we want.

Incentivized

• The services are easy to use and robust, but there is room for improvement. Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last 2 years of use. There haven't been any new features or innovations in that time.
• API integration and automation is not easy for most folks to jump into and there is very little technical support or documentation to take advantage of such features.
• The standard reports are generally sufficient, but there isn't any customization or intelligence available.

Incentivized

• Administration web page is little bit hard to understand at the beginning specially if you are not familiar with naming convention and GU Interfaces.
• Call Detail Record interface is fine but would be desirable to include more options that fit organization needs in terms of reporting purposes.
• Self Care Portal interface could be more useful to the end user if it includes options to manage some features without administrators involving.

Incentivized

There is no reason not to, it has proven effective in the usage

We have been using this product for 20+ years and will continue too. This is a great product and new features are always coming out.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

This was the first phone system we implemented that could span multiple locations. We were very satisfied once fully implemented

Incentivized

CallFire has a pricing structure that is attractive to us as a small business. The "pay as you use" options helps us keep our overhead low, especially with so many softwares already in our tech stack. It's a tremendous value for the cost!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• I sent out a broadcast message pretty deep in our data base, well three years out. I had one customer come in and buy thanking me for contacting her.
• Our holiday season was up 35% over last year, this year we used CallFire more than we did in the past.

Incentivized

• Communication and collaboration - Our offices are able to communicate both internally and externally due to this system.
• Down time - Struggles with CUCM has caused a lot of down time due to the instability of the system.
• High Costs - the cost of both the license and the maintenance was much higher than other systems.

Incentivized