Grasshopper is an IP telephony business communication solution that provides companies with a toll-free or local phone number. It has both desktop and mobile applications and includes features such as custom greeting recording, call forwarding, call transfer, call reporting, and voicemail.
$29
per month
Lifesize CxEngage
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
CxEngage is a cloud contact center solution designed to meet users' needs and
work in their environment. Unlike monolithic architectures and on-premises
solutions, CxEngage is a ‘born-in-the-cloud’ platform to deliver unified visibility
across voice, video, and digital channels. CxEngage is designed to just work
anywhere, and to be implemented in a few days or weeks.
Grasshopper is well suited for basic needs of texting in and out as well as calling out if you would like to avoid using your personal line. It also eliminates the need to have a dedicated land land in your office or business. You can obtain a vanity number and forward calls through grasshopper.
CxEngage can handle some more complex flow options that other vendors don't seem to be able to do. The integration for voice calls with Salesforce is a huge plus. The integration of email support with Salesforce is a BIG miss. After fighting with it for a year, we finally just turned it off and use Salesforce Omnichannel for email support. Chat using Salesforce Live Agent worked fine enough.
It would be nice to have the ability to transfer some calls to another Grasshopper IVR, for those customers who mistakenly dial the wrong number (we have two incoming numbers, one for corporate and one for sales).
Likewise, it would be nice to have the ability to forward to a toll-free number, which would have allowed us to work around the inability to transfer between IVRs (see above).
Lastly, it would be great to have an 'emergency' switch setting (default off but could be toggled on) that would let us override all IVR settings and transfer all incoming calls elsewhere (either to a direct dial or toll free number) for those rare times when we cannot take any calls (such as a weather emergency OR the one time each year we take all of our staff on a retreat) - that would allow us to send all calls to a backup answering service rather than just voicemail.
Stronger support and more reliable system for users not on a commercial network
Consumer friendly and intuitive reporting and dashboard tools. build canned reports
Reporting: Ability to get a combined SVL for all queues included on a report (now we manually calculate after exporting the report into excel). Same for all major data points (ASA, AHT, etc.)
Ability to include abandoned calls and an abandonment percentage which excludes short abandons on the Queue summary report. Now the report just shows total abandons and abandonment percentage so if we want to exclude short abandons we have to pull a separate report to find out how many calls abandoned in less than 10 seconds then calculate the "true abandoned number" (calls abandoned minus short abandons)
Ability to change what is considered a "short abandon" and then report on it. Right now the only option is the built in tracking of calls that abandoned in equal to or less than 10 seconds.
Ability to "save" an agents "default" skill profile so that any changes we make can be returned to "BAU" with a click of a button
quicker data/historical report retrieval
way to separate what we have listed as a queue name for reporting vs. what is used for the queue name in the "whisper" (the issue we had with WT queue naming conventions because we had to have the whisper be super precise)
When I was setting up my account I contacted support a couple of times. They were also very professional, personable, and helpful. Their response is prompt and thorough. I'm confident I can get any question answered as well as help with any issue I might have. That's pretty important to me.
We implemented in 2018 and were only given 8 weeks to do it...as per the direction of our parent company at the time. Serenova at the time responded well and we were able to go Live within 8-weeks...albeit the product overall was a big change and had gaps in features over our previous contact management solution.
I have not used any other phone services like Grasshopper. I know that there is another option out there called Ruby, which is more like a virtual receptionist but since I did not try it out I cannot compare the two. When I started my company I found the services that Grasshopper offers to be perfect. It still works for us and we have no need to change to anything else right now.
It's been too many years...I don't remember. Except in 2021 we looked briefly at Amazon and Salesforce call center offerings. Both were too basic at the time that even if we got a great deal on licensing (we are a Salesforce house for other things), we couldn't easily (or at all) do things like Callbacks and some of the more robust flow buildouts that we have in place today with Lifesize.
