Freshdesk Contact Center ( Formerly Freshcaller) is a call center software for startups and small teams. Fresh Contact Center aims to enable businesses / teams set-up and run a call center without spending a lot of time and money. It is suited for phone teams of size 1- 30. Users can create custom greeting texts based on specific call scenarios. The nested Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system allows the user to provide a detailed set of options to callers. The call queues…
$0
per agent/per month
Webex Calling
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Webex Calling is Cisco’s flagship cloud calling solution with over 12 million users worldwide. It delivers an enterprise-grade calling experience that enables customers to replace PBX hardware with a cloud calling solution. Webex Calling's connectivity and collaboration experience includes calling, meetings, messaging, contact center, and integrated devices.
The tool may be set up and operating in a couple of hours, and its implementation is straightforward. When we join up for the service, all we have to do is buy a phone number and load some money into our account, and we can start using the tool right away. After that point, …
One scenario where Freshdesk Contact Center is well suited is when we have a lot of parents calling in with requests about student transcripts, and or grades, we can better interact with each caller and not have a lot of people on hold waiting for a long time. One scenario where Freshdesk might not be well suited is when callers get the chatbot more often than talking to an actual person.
It seems quite able to handle the normal day to day voice call requirements quite well. Our previous Cisco phones had cameras that could do video calls, but if we need that we go to a Zoom session. Conference room use is not terribly convenient, although this might just be a case of us figuring out how to adapt the environment.
Internal calling can be done by searching user in directory or by dialing short code extensions for users. Pretty quick and easy to reach internal people.
Webex Calling integrated seamlessly with call recording solutions making it very useful for compliance call recording which is needed by customer service centres today.
Features like call forwarding, call transfer, conference, voice mail, etc are available.
User authorisation for different types of calls is available.
It provides basic call centre features as well so that companies requiring basic call centre features can use it within Webex Calling.
Cost - the system was felt to be way overpriced for the feature-set it provided. For the cost of 10 support agents, I could engage with a full-blown VoIP UCaaS provider to support 20-30 users.
The system was dependent on the Amazon Web Services system, which was prone to outages, and as it was outsourced by Freshworks to Amazon, resolution time did not have clear SLAs.
Non-US support - any issues encountered with the system would go through international channels which decreased resolution time depending on when the development team was available.
Call reliability was questionable - sometimes agents would have ringing devices that would have no one on the other end - other times calls would be dropped without explanation.
I think what it's doing is it is still the leader when it comes to being able to present calling platforms. And I mean I guess it's number one competitor from a software perspective is Microsoft Teams, Cisco is doing everything possible to provide open source to enable Microsoft and Cisco to work together, particularly when it comes to user room experiences so that no one is feeling like they're left alone or compromised or somewhat segregated when they're choosing one technology versus the other, which is a great thing.
The service can be intermittent and the call forwarding feature will not always work perfectly. There will be periods of time where the calling feature will not work at all and people on the other end can hear me but I am unable to hear them. It also requires a fairly strong signal which can be an issue if you work somewhere remote or a building without much service.
It's a really simple and affordable software solution if you're looking to upgrade your system or processes to a softphone. The service has been fantastic for both our outbound sales team and our inbound customer service team. As a manager, I'm really grateful I found FreshCaller early on in the process of evaluating companies to go to for a softphone.
It is a very easy product to deploy and configure and to really take advantage of. It does not matter if you are using it in an office or your home, or for a security office or a collaboration meeting room - you have the right endpoint available for each case and the configuration parameters to improve the functionality you need.
I've not actually had it ever be unavailable when I needed to use it. As mentioned before, a network outage would take it down, but we have redundant systems for our network connections with automatic failover.
I don't really see this impacting any other system performance at all. The client is very light use on resources, even on my iPhone. I don't know what else it connects to behind the scenes other then the campus directory, but I haven't seen or heard of any impacts. It seems fairly self contained except for wherever it interfaces with the general telephone system connectivity outside the campus.
Freshcaller support is great. They will respond very quickly once I submit a ticket. On occasion, they are unable to answer a question and require a deep dive on some research for random questions but that's completely understandable. Overall, great service, great quality, and very accommodating. This is one of the better support groups, in my opinion.
I have been working for a long time with Cisco as a provider and also Cisco TAC and Cisco Support Engineers. The support starts right beforehand in the documentation of the product you are interested in. From the start you have a good, complete, and detailed and easy to read datasheet and there's always someone available to answer any questions.
After multiple checks and constant research we found Freshdesk is one of the leading product service providers and the best at it too. We used to have PSTIN hard phones which caused a lot of drops and customer discontent. After Freshdesk, it has been a cakewalk. Really happy with it.
The company uses Microsoft Teams. They do use Microsoft Teams right now and for a long time a lot of the different practices have been using on-premise, contact Call Manager and Unified Communications Express. But Cisco WebEx, the cloud-based product is one of the new ones. And some of our other site practices are also using RingCentral. So cloud calling is not new to the company. For those of us who are familiar with Cisco products, the transition to WebEx calling is not as difficult as it might be for some other products. Going from on-prem to RingCentral, there is more of a learning curve with.
So far it has been very reliable, with very little down time that was associated with the product itself. We have had network outages due to external factors such as construction cutting a fiber link, but other than that kind of thing not much for failures.
Webex Calling allowed us to continue working in a remote world
While workshops are best in person, Webex Calling allowed us to continue offering that critical service and also included break out room functionality for small group activities, when needed.
The recording feature allows everyone to hyper focus on the discussion - if anything was missed in notes, it was always saved in the recording when we had one. Perfect for interviews and workshops.