Item: Webex Calling
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Webex Calling

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

WebEx Calling is an all-in-one VoIP solution that takes care of all of our incoming calls. It also handles internal calling, extensions. It adds the ability to handle calls via a cell phone application, desktop application, or physical phone. Incoming calls are presented with a greeting and options, or they can dial the extension they are looking to reach. They can also dial by name or perform directory lookups.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Significant uptime; no outages or disruptions
Call Routing
Analytics

Cons

Complexity in adding extensions, devices; almost always need to utilize a CSV to add extensions.
Support (TAC team) sometimes does not know their product
Support for more phones - Cisco WebEx calling only supports Cisco devices for desk phones.

Return on Investment

Compared to on-premise Cisco system, ROI is fantastic; cheaper to purchase this versus maintain existing warranties and deal with the complexity of an on-premise system.
Easy to manage and maintain once fully setup; it took weeks to setup an on-premise system with the best Cisco engineers assisting. It took me 2 hours to setup 80 extensions and get the system up and running
The calling analytics have helped us to excel with customer service and identifying calls that were left unanswered.

All-in-one Platform

I have not really integrated any other applications with Cisco WebEx Calling. However, we were already utilizing collaboration applications that were filling these additional requirements.

Security

WebEx Calling by default has two factor authentication off, so I had to enable that especially on administrative accounts. I never doubted the security as calls were always encrypted and handled appropriately by WebEx; I always trusted my data was safe and secure with Cisco.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Teams

WebEx Calling has extensions and an intuitive interface; it is what I am used to when calling and handling calls. Teams lacks extensions, and ease of setup and use. It also does not integrate well with ATA boxes for paging and other features whereas Teams makes this difficult to integrate by requiring additional gateway appliances to be installed.

Key Insights

Do you think Webex Calling delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Webex Calling's feature set?

Yes

Did Webex Calling live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Webex Calling go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Webex Calling again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Cisco Meraki Dashboard, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft 365

Likelihood to Recommend

WebEx Calling is well suited for SMBs and potentially enterprises. The unlimited reign you have in adding extensions, ring groups, call queues, greetings (IVRs) is substantial. For our small business, we integrated it and there were many features available which we never utilized.

However, if you are a very small business with only 10 or less extensions, adding in a complex system such as this is not really necessary as there are a lot of moving parts - the Cisco portion, and then adding phone lines from a different provider can be quite complex and a lot can go wrong. Cisco also makes it fairly difficult to add extensions, devices, and users, and there is a lot of room for error during and after the process. Licensing needs to be purchased from a third-party vendor or MSP and not Cisco directly.

Webex Calling Feature Ratings

Comments

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Decent VoIP phone system, with some difficulty adding extensions.