Item: Talkdesk
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When we first migrated to Talkdesk, every call center agent was using Talkdesk as well as our entire Operations staff. This included our CSR's, Sales, IT, HR, Etc... The longer we were with Talkdesk the more we realized it is not suited well for dedicated lines and had to move our Operations staff and Sales agents to another phone system (Zoom in our case). The CSR's are still using Talkdesk due to the depth of reporting, ease of monitoring/pulling calls, and overall call center structure.

Pros and Cons

In-depth, although complicated, reporting.
Call routing, (although this changes depending on what features you leverage)
Small and simple local application

Call quality (Calls bounce between multiple servers during calls)
Voicemail management is lacking in functionality
Consistency, every new update changes fundamentals of how the system works.

Return on Investment

We have seen decreased CSAT scores since moving to Talkdesk.
Talkdesk has decreased agent productivity over our previous call center solution.
Talkdesk has led to less usage of prebuilt/internal reporting and led to managers creating their own reports in excel.

Usability

Talkdesk's features are detailed and comprehensive, but very confusing from a standard user's perspective. When we first moved to Talkdesk, they were simple to set up and needed little to no maintenance over time. As more features have been released, their system has become more complicated and requires a lot more maintenance. It feels they are trying to become a competitor for Cisco when they started as a solution for people trying to avoid solutions like that.

Implementation Rating

Talkdesk porting team is great to work with, and their process for implementation is simple. Once you have started the porting request, the phone number will be available for use as an outbound number, and you will be able to configure the number well before the port date. We unconditionally forwarded our numbers to dummy numbers in TD that was replaced with the ported numbers at a port time, but we also had the advantage of using the ported numbers as outbound numbers from the beginning removing the need to keep unused numbers in case of a callback.

Exceptional Examples of Talkdesk Support

Talkdesk's partner managers are top-notch. Overall, we have had a great experience with the partner managers. They scheduled and maintained monthly partnership calls, and had EBR's in person once a year. The partner manager works closely with a technical contact as well that is not afraid to jump in a call with you and work with you to fix whatever issues you may have.

Alternatives Considered

RingCentral, Five9, Zoom Phone and InsideSales Playbooks (formerly XANT Playbooks)

Prior to using Talkdesk, we used RC, and it was far worse than Talkdesk. The reporting was almost non-existent, but it did take a lot less maintenance. Five9 was evaluated after we moved to Talkdesk as a potential solution, but we felt they didn't fix many of the issues we were having with the structure of Talkdesk. Instead of switching to Five9, we move our Sales team to Zoom Phone and Playbooks. This solution works much better for individual numbers with high outbound volume.

Key Insights

Do you think Talkdesk delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Talkdesk's feature set?

Did Talkdesk live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Talkdesk go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Talkdesk again?

Other Software Used

Zoom Phone, InsideSales Playbooks (formerly XANT Playbooks), Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

Talkdesk works well for small/medium-sized call centers with simple routing and NO dedicated lines. When mixing dedicated and shared lines Talkdesk fails miserably, especially in the reporting. They had an old feature (Teams) that was a decent solution to this issue, but this is not supported in all of the new reporting features. Reporting can be outstanding, assuming your users are technically inclined. The company's employees are primarily developers (Over 50%), this is great for getting new features out, but a lot of these features were obviously designed by a software developer, not a UI/UX designer.

Talkdesk, great for small/simple call centers, not for anything else.

Overall Satisfaction with Talkdesk