Item: Talkdesk
Rating: 6
Author: Jeanette Wiley

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Owl Labs is currently using Talkdesk for our Sales and CX teams. We wanted a customer facing phone system that would allow us to customize our IVR, be able to transfer calls to live agents, voicemails, and external phone numbers as well. With our previous system, we had a lot of smaller limitations that were adding up and causing it to be difficult to scale. With Talkdesk, we have many ways to scale our system with simple fixes like pre-setting our holiday messaging and hours months in advance.

Pros and Cons

Customization of IVR.
Great onboarding support.
Integration with Salesforce.

Lacking continued success manager support. After onboarding, you are transferred to general support. Sometimes, we need help with more strategic & bigger picture decisions post launch that would be great to talk through with a CSM.
I wish the features available in the web app were available in the call bar app. It would make it a bit easier for our reps to have one less place to look to manage voicemails.

Return on Investment

We've had far better reporting with Talkdesk. They come with tons of pre-made dashboards that provide insight into all kinds of call metrics. With our previous phone system, we really could not rely on the reporting features.

Usability

Talkdesk is very simple to use and easy to integrate with Salesforce and Helpscout. Some of our reps have confusion around the Phone widget in Salesforce, the callbar app, and the web app. There are a couple of places to look/manage and sometimes that can get confusing for our team.

Implementation Rating

Talkdesk pairs you with a customer success manager, and it is incredibly helpful to get onboarded and ready to launch. I wish there was a little bit more support with UAT testing when it comes to the Salesforce integration, but everything else about onboarding was very straightforward. Talkdesk's knowledge base is also quite robust.

Exceptional Examples of Talkdesk Support

There was a miscommunication with our previous phone provider and they turned off our service before we had fully ported our number over to Talkdesk. While this was not a Talkdesk issue, they were able to get back to me right away to prevent our phone service from being down entirely. We made a quick fix and got everything back up and running.

Alternatives Considered

Aircall, RingCentral and Zoom Phone

Zoom Phone has all CX requirements met for our team, but we worried about prospecting/outbound options for Sales and ability to grow with our team in the future. We opted to use Zoom Phone internally for our non-customer-facing team instead. The downsides of Ring Central include the lack of auto-delete for recordings - we would need manually delete recordings. Additionally, voicemails only go to one person. There was no shared inbox across teams.

Key Insights

Do you think Talkdesk delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Talkdesk's feature set?

Yes

Did Talkdesk live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Talkdesk go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Talkdesk again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Zoom Phone, Slack, Zapier

Likelihood to Recommend

Talkdesk is definitely geared towards large call centers with high call volume and many reps stationed on phones. We have a comparatively smaller Sales team, but still find value out of the ability to route calls to different reps using their personal extensions (rather than each rep needing their own separate phone number). It's also nice that you have a few options for how to make and take calls. You can use the Callbar app, the mobile app, or forward numbers to an external number (forward to your cell). I'm confident that Talkdesk will continue to grow with us and we won't have to worry about switching phone systems again as we grow our team.

Scalable solution for Salesforce integration

Overall Satisfaction with Talkdesk