Best Inbound Call Center Services Compared

Offering quality customer service is necessary to ensure your business’s survival. Simply answering calls from customers isn’t enough, you need an inbound call center service to manage communications effectively and promptly. After reviewing dozens of options, we found RingCentral to be the best call center service for most. Its features include an advanced omnichannel routing solution, plus voice-to-text and video chatting features.

The Best Inbound Call Center Service for Most

RingCentral is one of our top choices when it comes to many categories of modern communication. Its inbound call center service offering is no exception and rises above the rest of the field in our eyes.

This is an incredibly versatile platform that blends outbound and inbound call center services. RingCentral caters to the needs of both small and large businesses. You get access to many excellent features—including some advanced ones like skill-based routing—designed to simplify and streamline customer communications. 

The Best Inbound Call Center Service Options to Consider

1. RingCentral — The best for most
2. Zendesk — Best for unifying remote workers
3. Nextiva — Best for customer support reporting and analytics
4. Go Answer — Best for handling heavy call volume
5. TeleDirect — Best lead management with contact center services

When It Makes Sense to Invest in an Inbound Call Center Service

Generally, investing in an inbound call center service makes sense if you need to provide attentive, specialized customer service to your customers or prospects. The better the quality of that service, the more potential your company has for growth and customer retention.

So, when do you know you’re missing opportunities that would be solved by an inbound call center service? Consider these scenarios and see if any of them sound like yours:

• You’re struggling to deliver high-quality customer support because your employees cannot handle the current volume of calls
• You want to create strategies for improvement but don’t have a way to collect and analyze data from customer service interactions
• Your customer turnover is high because of disappointing interactions with your company reps
• You’re failing to offer exceptional support to high-priority accounts due to an inability to prioritize care and reps to certain clients

These are all situations where an inbound call center service can improve outcomes and lay the groundwork for growth. In any of these, the underlying virtue is fostering customer loyalty and positivity about your brand.

So, after reading this, you may think your organization could benefit from a solution. Read on to find out about our top picks for inbound call center services and identify the best fit for your needs.

#1 — RingCentral — The Best for Most

With RingCentral, you can speed up your customer support and keep your agents productive in the easiest possible way.

It’s a blended outbound and inbound cloud communication solution that allows you to extend immediate and helpful customer support from everywhere. Tons of versatile features help optimize customer service agent schedules and prevent long hold times for customers.

Use skill-based routing to direct incoming calls to the most suitable available agent for prompt and focused issue resolution. Plus, leverage advanced omnichannel routing to reroute inbound calls based on agent capacity, availability, and other custom rules you can set. 

Third-party integrations with popular CRMs and apps like Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Chili Piper further boost call center productivity.

And there are deeper features you may not have thought to utilize. Gamification elements incentivize live agents’ productivity while reducing downtime and costs. Or, use in-platform scheduling to optimize your call center team’s timetable after factoring in vacations, call volume, and training schedules.

RingCentral also has comprehensive reporting and a dashboard that lets you visualize how an agent is performing. Speech and text analytics, agent scoring, and feedback forms are additional features that help you track agent progress.

RingCentral Contact Center pricing comes in four tiers, with each successive package offering more advanced features. If you pay for an entire year in advance for your chosen plan, you can save up to 33%. Reach out to RingCentral today for a demo and customized quote.

#2 — Zendesk — Best for Unifying Remote Workers

Zendesk’s cloud-based call center platform, Sunshine, comes with an omnichannel ticketing system that makes it easier than ever to deliver seamless customer experiences—even if your reps are never in the same building.

Team members can utilize the platform from anywhere, including their homes. With Zendesk Sunshine’s call forwarding and routing capabilities, work-from-home employees can take calls on their personal landlines, computer, or mobile devices with the same ease as any of their teammates in your physical call center. 

Use this platform to build fast and personalized inbound call center experiences for customers and offer them the convenience to reach out to your reps over SMS, social media, or email, if they’re not fans of talking on the phone. 

Zendesk Sunshine allows you to view key metrics at a glance on customizable dashboards. Help customer support teams improve operations over time until they consistently deliver stellar customer experiences. Monitor queue volumes and performance with real-time reporting and track calls and issue progress with tickets.

Plus, access to time-saving tools like automatic ticket creation and saved customer profiles further empowers customer support agents. Other key features include IVR/voice recognition and automated routing.

Contact Zendesk sales for pricing information about its Sunshine call center solution.

#3 — Nextiva — Best for Customer Support Reporting and Analytics

Nextiva makes it easy to keep a finger on the pulse of your contact center’s performance. You can also make better business decisions based on real-time overviews and data. 

Monitor how your agents are handling inbound calls with customized wallboards to easily view business phone activity. A scheduled call reporting feature provides data on your call volume, inbound calls, outbound calls and talk time, and toll-free calls—all presented in a clean and customizable dashboard. 

Nextiva also gives you information regarding the customer support calls you missed in the past 60 days.

This platform strikes just the right balance between inbound and outbound calls. 

Use Nextiva to make automatic adjustments, provide tailored service, and implement speech-enabled IVR for personalized, proactive communication. Its optimization capabilities include multi-skill and multi-channel staffing forecasts, quality monitoring and coaching tools, and adherence.

Another exciting feature is its intelligent virtual agent (IVAs) feature that manages repetitive communication, freeing up your live agents’ time to focus on customer issues that require a human touch.

Nextiva currently offers four Contact Center packages, but you’ll have to contact the sales team for pricing.

Gain more valuable knowledge about what is and isn’t working at your call center by getting started with Nextiva.

#4 — Go Answer — Best for Handling Heavy Call Volume

Go Answer is a popular, bilingual contact center that you can utilize to outsource your inbound call handling. That makes it a great solution on its own for companies that don’t want or can’t afford to staff representatives to handle customer calls.

Go Answer can handle inbound services for telephone, email, video chat, webchat, and ticketing. But what’s great is that it can be utilized as a full outsourced call center or a supplement for handling massive call volume. 

24/7 live answering makes handling large volumes of incoming calls a breeze. Agents can answer customers using a script you customize beforehand to ensure all communication is professional and on-brand. 

In case a customer issue requires in-depth assistance that Go Answer reps can’t handle themselves, they will record caller contact information and their reason for calling, then forward it to relevant contacts in your organization.

Agents can also engage in customer retention services like pacifying dissatisfied callers and offering discount vouchers on your behalf.

Use Go Answer‘s dedicated client portals to view your account details in real-time. There, you can track minutes used and minutes remaining, calls received, call results, and average call duration, among several other factors. You can also make updates to agent scripts directly on the portal, and the script will be updated in real-time. 

Go Answer agents can also handle appointment bookings and general customer support, as well as hotline services for crisis management and after-sales service.

Plans start at $50 per month, plus a $1.15/minute average fee, for the pay-as-you-go option. Two other plans include a set amount of minutes for $110 or $250 per month. The per-minute fee reduces on the more expensive plans. Be aware, too, that every plan has a $75 setup fee.

Reach out to Go Answer today to find the right suite of services for your organization.

#5 — TeleDirect — Best Lead Management with Call Center Services

Another comprehensive inbound and outbound call center service that utilizes its own agents, TeleDirect offers all the vital services you would want in a call center. Outsource or supplement your call center with TeleDirect’s customized service packages. 

This unified cloud communication system integrates its 400 live agents to serve as shared, semi-dedicated, or dedicated representatives of your company that provide prompt customer support to your customers.

TeleDirect agents offer Level 1 technical support to resolve troubleshooting issues and order processing help. They also assist callers using FAQs you provide them. And, if they are unable to help, they take the caller’s message and forward it to your company to ensure no issue is left unresolved.

What really makes TeleDirect stand out is its set of services for lead management. From verification and qualification through conversion, TeleDirect can help your B2B business handle keeping your sales pipeline full of quality with the same aplomb as client issues and requests 

What’s more, TeleDirect has partnered up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to operate its global cloud infrastructure. This guarantees you the highest level of reliability and redundancy available through geographically dispersed and fault-tolerant web architecture that is constantly monitored and managed to meet the highest standards. 

Submit a request for a customized quote from TeleDirect today.

Methodology for Choosing the Best Inbound Call Center Service

Getting a reliable inbound call center service will be one of your best business decisions—provided you do it right. Keep these considerations below in mind when making your purchase decision.

Expected Call Volume

Some inbound call centers are appropriate for small teams or small customer bases; others are better for larger forms of either. That much is probably obvious to you already. 

Know what you need to handle and what you’re going to need to handle down the road if everything shakes out right. You’ll likely gain some efficiency and capacity just by implementing an inbound call center service, but will it be enough if you experience serious growth in the quarters or years ahead? And if it won’t, can you hire more reps or will you be better off outsourcing some or all of your call center operations?

Look for solutions that meet your call volume requirements without having to overpay for functionalities you don’t need or compromise on features you do.

Integrations

Does a call center service integrate with software and tools you already use? That’s a key answer you’ll want in hand before committing to one of these service providers.

Ensure the software you’re currently using integrates your tech stack. That can mean a lot of different components need to work together, depending on how elaborate your operation is. You’ll definitely want to ensure it plays nicely with your CRM, ticketing software, field service management software, or other platforms essential to the work your organization does. 

Otherwise, you’ll face serious issues when sharing data across platforms and trying to analyze where to improve in the future. 

Security and Support

What kind of security and compliance do you need? Different industries have different regulations regarding information gathered and shared over the phone and internally, but there is a base requirement of safe handling of customer data and personal information regardless. 

Check your prospective platform’s security measures and encryption to ensure it has taken the necessary measures to safeguard your and your customer’s data. If you go with an outsourced solution, ensure their data collection and storage passes a strict standard of information security. 

Beyond privacy and security, you need to make sure you have a direct, open, and reliable line of communication with your inbound call center service provider. Opt for solutions offering 24/7 live agent support to ensure consistent agent availability for your company (and for your customers if you’re outsourcing). 

The Top Inbound Call Center Services in Summary

When looking for the best inbound call center service for you, get a feel of how the companies handle actual customer interactions and zero in on the features that will deliver what you’re opting into this service for.

Based on our research, RingCentral and Zendesk are excellent choices to stay on top of customer issues and deliver the best possible customer experiences to drive loyalty and promote growth.