Fuze is a cloud-based unified communications platform that includes IP PBX voice service, video conferencing, and collaboration tools such as content sharing and instant messaging capabilities. It also integrates with a wide range of popular CTI, CRM, and click-to-call solutions.
$15
per month
Zendesk Talk
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Zendesk Talk is call center software built on the Twilio cloud communication platform that integrates with the Zendesk Support ticketing system. This allows customer service teams to provide phone support from the same platform they use to manage all other channels.
Fuze has way more capability than we need for our small office so it might be best suited for large installations, call centers, and complex environments. Our office is small and our needs [are] minimal, so when we need support we are challenged to understand the support person due to our lack of technical sophistication. We sometimes feel like we should switch to a solution more geared for consumers or SOHO. Nevertheless, Fuze provides reliable service at [a] reasonable cost that meets our needs, and because support is rarely needed we are happy with them most of the time, i.e. when support isn't needed.
Zendesk Talk is a great partner that helps us in the customer care area by managing every type of contact with customers (both phone calls and emails). I know there is also the possibility to have integration with instant messaging apps (like messenger and WhatsApp but I have never used them in my experience). In my opinion, the best scenario for Zendesk Talk is represented by a context with a high amount of contacts/requests where a unique platform could be a help both on the external side (customers) and on the internal side (a lot of colleagues who are working in the same area and have to work in a coordinate way). For customers, they could benefit from tailor-made answers, also based on past contacts for the same topic, and avoid waiting times during phone calls, with an immediate follow-up. For internal work management, operators don't overlap in a single request, and even if the same operator is not available the one who manages the request later has complete visibility of the entire topic from the historical point of view. Last but not least, I think that Zendesk Talk helps a lot in the context in which the request's speed is a KPI to manage constantly.
Support Team - the best I have ever worked with. They help 24/7 on any issue I could come across. Usually it is an item I could fix myself and they fix it and show me how to fix the same issue if I have it in the future.
Contact Center - We do Commercial Collections involving Sales and Collections. We have 50 people on the phone at one time. Contact Center lets a Manager listen live and gives help if the rep needs help selling or collecting.
Pandemic 2020 - without Fuze we would have been unable to work for 3 months. They saved our "rears" since we already had all their services up and running for years.
The lag on the phone is by far the most annoying thing with Zendesk talk due to the voice over IP.
Using the Reporting feature in Zendesk has never been a walk in the park. We have to customize a lot of fields and when something doesn't seem to add up, it at times feels like pulling teeth to get to the final answer of what went wrong.
Fuze is a solid application that is a great asset to the business for our sales staff to make daily calls to clients and candidates. Managers can monitor call data and times to keep up to date with team performance, as well as monitor calls for users on their team. The Fuze/MS Teams integration is an exciting prospect that would be very beneficial to us as a business, for seamless integration between the 2 platforms.
Fuze was built with the end-user in mind. It was built to have a common interface on mobile and desktop. Fuze Web is new, and it also has the exact same interface as the desktop and mobile, and they are still working on the ability to make phone calls from the browser itself, currently it can do meetings just fine. Everything about Fuze was built with the end-user in mind.
We've had a few outages over the past year. More than other vendors I've used. They usually have outages fixed within an hour. The downside is they do not provide root cause of outages. If they do at takes them at least a month to get it to you
Since Fuze runs across multiple devices and platforms they really strived to make a lightweight interface that is optimized for phone calls, chat, and collaboration. The web client loads fast, the chat is always up-to-date, phone calls arrive on-time. The desktop client is the most feature rich and basically it just adds desktop sharing functionality as well as VoIP for calling, and the mobile client doesn't consume a lot of battery, and it stays running to get phone calls, chats, and can do meetings over Wifi, Cellular Data, or Cellular voice.
Our experience with Fuze support has been overall very positive. Their technicians seem to be well trained and able to handle a variety of requests and issues without unnecessary delays or extensive troubleshooting. Fuze allows enough customer access to avoid the need to call support for every little issue but is ready to assist when issues are beyond our capabilities to resolve.
In our experience, we have had to go through many support people then ultimately getting frustrated enough to go directly to our point of contact who then doesn't always seem to be able to assist. We tend to get the support we need when it is escalated up to me and I reach out to our point of a contact person to express our frustration.
At many of our sites with more than 50 users, Fuze sent someone onsite to train. This worked surprisingly well, as the trainer allowed the users to set the pace and answered TONS of questions. Fuze has a very streamlined training process, their staff is very professional, very knowledgeable and very engaging.
Fuze has vast amounts of training videos and guides on how to use its products and services. There are literally endless-hours of training and I often point end-users to a particular video which addresses the specific needs of the user, for example: how to check voicemail. Or, how to share your desktop, etc.
Personally, I didn't have any trouble getting started with Fuze. It was installed on my computer on my first day and I was good to go! Little to no hiccups. I was not with the company when they first adapted Fuze so I can not speak to the implementation as a whole.
Fuze was far more expensive and more complicated to set up. Our current platform took a few days to set up with SSO. Our contact center took a bit longer but works amazingly.
Slack and Zoom phones cannot compare because they have no ticketing systems. Zendesk Talk was the only option we considered because we were already using Zendesk for our email ticketing with customer concerns. We then expanded to using Zendesk's chatbot and then the Zendesk Talk system to keep it all integrated and streamlined.
Fuze does have scalability limits but most of that is how many end-points they can put on a virtual PBX, or VCX as they call them, I THINK its limit is somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000, but we've not had issues with that because we have put users into various VCXs some by location, some by department or function. Either way, we have 7,000 currently deployed, and are going to end up with over 15,000 when we are done, Fuze is VERY scalable.
We were able to reduce global headcount by 20% in our call centers.
Allowing customers to leave voicemails creates the personal touch needed and really increases our customer connectivity score. We saw increases in our CSAT scores after the implementation of this solution.
Call handling time and case reopen rates both decreased. Y/y it decreased 18% and 60%.
