The best small business call centre software in 2023: Essentials for tight budgets

Call centres are often a distant dream for small business owners. The cost of buying equipment, renting space, and hiring employees to answer the phones can eat up a lot of an already small budget. And if you’re like most small businesses, you probably don’t have an IT team that can do all of this for you.

However, having a call centre in place can make a huge difference to your survival as a company. Customers need a platform for their account questions, support queries, and complaints. Providing consumers with the services they need is a vital step toward maintaining their loyalty. And, from a sales perspective, call centres offer opportunities to nurture new shoppers for your business.

Luckily, technological advances and digital channels have completely reinvented the contact centre—both in appearance and cost. Today, all that’s needed to run your own call centre or contact centre is a good internet connection and a service provider’s software package. No pricey phones or office space needed! With the right technology, the call centre dream can become a reality for any small business.

First off, what is call centre software, exactly?

If you're already familiar with what this is, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.

A call centre software is basically a dedicated platform that lets you manage your customer interactions, all in one place (ideally).

Compared to older “legacy” or advanced call centre companies and solutions, many of today’s platforms are in the cloud. That means you don’t need a big office with rows and rows of analog phone systems and actual telephones anymore. But don’t worry, the newer software still lets you do things like queue people needing assistance and transfer calls between departments.

We’re not saying traditional hardware was bad (okay, maybe a little bit), but it certainly had its limits. It was expensive for IT teams to maintain, prone to outages, and of course, required all your call centre agents to work in the same location. Want to hire more people and get them onboarded quickly (or downsize the team)? Good luck.

The introduction of VoIP (that’s voice over internet protocol) has changed everything—it uses the internet instead of a telephone exchange for your phone connection, and it’s opened up a whole new (cheaper) world of calling.

Fenway Health discovered how cost-effective and flexible Dialpad is when they switched to a cloud-based contact centre platform from their legacy phone system. Now, they've lowered operational costs thanks to Dialpad's all-inclusive pricing (not to mention it's incredibly easy to use—with plenty of hands-on support).

Why should small businesses care about having the right call centre software?

Basically, call centre software is the key to providing a winning customer experience every time. Need to make sure your customers always get sent to the correct department or person? Look for a call routing feature.

Running a contact centre on your own and need to have a birds-eye view of how all your agents are doing? You’ll need call monitoring and analytics.

There’s a huge selection of call centre software available, whether you work in ecommerce, banking, or healthcare. For small(er) businesses, time and money are paramount, so look for versatile solutions that let you streamline the number of tools you’re using.

This way, you’re paying less in monthly or yearly software fees and your team isn’t collectively wasting as much time switching back and forth between windows and tools.

Small businesses need different solutions compared to large enterprises

You don’t need us to tell you how important it is to wow your customers when you’re a small business. You’re not a faceless corporation, and people tend to expect even more personal and warm service—even though you’re probably more strapped for time and resources than a big company!

And the biggest trap that small businesses and start-ups tend to fall into?

Trying to play like the big enterprises in their space, but trying to use the same tools. For small business call centre software, you need something that matches your current needs and offers expansion as your business grows. Otherwise, you’re going to be spending a whole lot of money unnecessarily.

The right software will help you deliver the best service levels possible, which gives you the best chance of maintaining and growing your customer base. And, should your business (and incoming call volume) start growing in size, it’ll let you easily expand on the features you already have.

Even a small team can play in the big leagues with the right call centre software

Long story short, the right platform empowers your customer service agents to not just do, but also excel at, their jobs. Let’s face it. There’s little job satisfaction (and not a lot of value) in having your team of agents deal with repetitive customer service calls that could be dealt with more quickly and efficiently by a chatbot on your website or over social media.

With a first-class routing system, your agents are free to have customer conversations that definitely need the human touch. And agent guidance, provided by AI, boosts their success rates and happiness in the job.

(Happier employees are more productive, which boosts your staff retention rate. And if you’re a small business, then empowered staff and a stable ship are both very good for longevity.)

10 essential call centre software features for small businesses

Rule of thumb: The more your software can do, the better. It’s far easier to have one cost-effective tool that does everything, as opposed to outsourcing the various tools you need to multiple suppliers. (It has to be a well-designed, good tool, of course. We’re not saying you should just go out and choose any old mediocre software that says it can do 10 different things.)

So, for most small businesses, it makes more sense to opt for an all-in-one solution that encompasses all the call centre services you need, with small business pricing plans to match. Why go for an additional agent coaching or customer callback scheduling tool when you can get one in the same software that has a bunch of other features you need?

Here are the major features every small business should look for when you’re choosing the best call centre software for your needs.

1. Seamless scalability and flexibility

Even if your contact centre team is small at the moment, you should keep your business’ future growth in mind. We’re talking about a two or three-year-long (at least) view. Does your call centre platform make it easy for you to add (and remove) agents as you’ll need to?

Just like with getting your team to adopt any new software, it’s important to make sure everyone, no matter how tech-savvy or not, is well-versed in using it. Coach your support team, and choose something that offers great after-purchase support—you’ll never know when you might need it.

For example, in Dialpad Ai Contact Centre, you can add and remove someone from your call centre team with literally a few clicks—no IT help needed:

This is one of the biggest advantages of going into the cloud for your call centre software: it gives you unimaginable levels of scalability and flexibility. With no physical restrictions on activity limits, you can expand your platform—and team—however you like.

But don't take our word for it...

2. Omnichannel capability

Ideally, the call centre software you go with will consolidate some (or even all) of your different tools together into a single platform. One benefit of this is that you’ll be able to manage all your communication channels in one place.

For example, thanks to Dialpad’s acquisition of Kare and Koopid, Dialpad Ai Contact Centre lets you manage literally all your channels—from live chat to social media to WhatsApp.

3. Self-service

Adding a chatbot to your website and enabling self-service for your site visitors is huge for call deflection—especially for smaller businesses with less staff that can quickly become overwhelmed on the phones. The more automation the better!

Dialpad lets you add a chatbot to your site, no problem. So you can give your customers instant answers, 24/7:

4. Robust analytics and KPIs

Having good contact centre analytics is key, especially for a small business. If you’re one person and you need to manage a team of 10 agents, you need to be able to see, at a glance, who's busiest, who's taking longer with customers, and who needs help on a call. You can’t listen to every single call all day, right?

Dialpad offers an in-depth analytics dashboard that tells you everything you need to know about your call centre activity and your agents’ performance. At all times.

There’s the “call volume over time” view, which lets you arrange data by call centre, groups or individuals. And if you have key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to hit, like average speed to answer, Dialpad shows you that too:

From peak calling times to your most-used communication channels, everything you need to keep an eye on in your call centre is at your fingertips in real time.

In fact, you can check out how fast-growing Firefly Health enabled its reps to answer calls much faster (40 seconds or less!)—and was able to prove it to outside stakeholders using analytics and show that they’re meeting stringent industry requirements.

5. Accurate call transcriptions

Monitoring agent performance the old-school way involved supervisors listening to call after call—and manually identifying areas for improvement. It was time-consuming (and boring), and very difficult for supervisors to catch everything after one listen, especially when trying to analyze longer calls.

Now imagine there’s a real-time call transcription feature in your call centre platform that creates transcripts for every call. Well, you don’t have to imagine, because Dialpad does exactly that (and more accurately than almost all competitors out there) thanks to Dialpad Ai:

You can scan more calls with less effort—no more needing to listen to every word.

Call transcriptions are essential for reviewing and doing quality assurance checks, and if your agents have to use scripts for legal purposes, you can check whether these have been followed correctly just by reading the transcription. Dialpad Ai also automatically isolates key moments in calls—like a competitor being frequently mentioned, or a product problem that multiple customers are reporting.

Another neat thing that Dialpad Ai can do is pick up on positive or negative words (which you can customise) on a call. It can then mark the sentiment of the call on the manager’s or supervisor’s dashboard so that you can see how all your calls are going in real time:

Call transcriptions aren’t just for the call centre's benefit either—you can put them to good use in other departments too. For example, the sales team can use transcriptions to identify cross- and upsell opportunities, make sure that you’re consistently meeting prospects’ expectations, and other lead generation tasks.

6. Agent helpers

When you have agents who are taking tens or hundreds of calls a day, tricky questions from difficult customers are bound to come up. How can you help them help your customers more effectively?

A good call centre solution should be able to help you here. Again, Dialpad Ai is designed to help with coaching and training. Not only can it transcribe your calls, it can also pick up on common questions and keywords that come up in the conversation, which you can turn into "Custom Moments" that get tracked and may indicate training needs, over time:

From here, you can help your team too, by creating Real-time Assist (RTA) cards, which are essentially cheat sheets that pop up when someone says a certain word on a call. For instance, if a customer uses the words “cost” or “pricing,” then you can create an RTA card with notes about pricing to help your agent talk about pricing:

If they don’t need it, they can just close the card.

7. The ability to take calls anywhere, anytime

As more and more people are working from anywhere, call centre teams are going remote too. The tricky thing with call centres especially is that agents are usually on the phones all day—which means they’ll need a good internet connection and contact centre tool.

For a manager, though, working from anywhere also requires you to be able to monitor agents and do admin stuff remotely. Can you set up new agents, give them phone numbers, and adjust all these details for a remote contact centre team? Think about it: employees could be able to service customers from around the world with an integrated answering service.

If you can pull it off, your small business can save a ton by not paying expensive office-rental fees or leasing an office space. (It’s good for your team too—no more commuting back and forth and more flexibility.)

8. Easy phone call routing setup

There’s nothing worse for busy callers to have to wait in a queue, only to find they’ve ended up in the wrong department.

Your call centre software should have an automatic call distribution system to make sure every customer call gets routed to the right agent. This may be done by analysing information from previous calls, or through a series of short questions (that you usually answer using your phone’s keypad).

In Dialpad, you have different routing options, from round-robin to skills-based routing. You can change these settings anytime from your dashboard, without calling IT:

9. Dedicated customer support

Your call centre is how customers reach you, which means it just has to work. But of course, technology inevitably does go down once in a while, so make sure that your call centre platform has good support depending on your business needs.

For example, Dialpad offers 24/7 live chat tech support, which means you can get answers to almost every question at any time of day or night. And there’s the online Help Centre, which is an in-depth source of FAQs that cover everything from admin level down to agent level. Whatever you need to know, it’ll likely be covered here.

No matter which of Dialpad's contact centre pricing tiers you're on, you get 24/7 live-chat support and phone support—worldwide. In the unlikely event of anything going wrong, our team is on hand to fix it in real time, meaning there’ll be minimum disruption to your customer service.

10. An integration with your CRM

Chances are, if you’re not already using a CRM (customer relationship management software), you will be very soon.

Salesforce and HubSpot are two popular ones, and then there's Zendesk if you're using ticketing software.

Dialpad integrates with all of these—its HubSpot integration lets you create contacts in HubSpot from your Dialpad dashboard. Just got off a call with a new (or potential) customer? You can hang up in Dialpad, and create a HubSpot Contact for them, right in the same window:

(And vice versa—the integration will automatically log calls made in Dialpad to HubSpot too. Once you’ve matched a HubSpot contact with that person’s info in Dialpad, HubSpot will automatically log calls with this contact!)

Having a CRM integration with your call centre platform is particularly useful for growing your small business because it’ll get harder and harder to keep track of all your prospects and customers.

This way, any agent or rep on your team (even new hires), can access the same information about your customers’ histories and past calls easily, all in the same place. Every touch point, every record. No more scattered folders and files.

The 14 best small business call centre software in 2023

So you’ve got a growing contact centre team (with around five people and you know you’re hiring more). You want to see the best call centre software providers out there. We’ve compiled some of the best and broken down each one. Let’s get into it.

1. Dialpad Ai Contact Centre

Okay, we know we’re biased. But we’re biased for a reason. Dialpad is just the best option for small businesses. The contact centre is built into the same platform as our UCaaS platform, meaning you can take your customer calls and message your teammates or have video meetings—all in one place.

And Dialpad Ai comes built-in. This is what transcribes your calls in real time, tracks keywords that come up in conversations—like your competitors’ names or product issues—and lets you create Real-time Assist (RTA) cards that pop up automatically for agents during phone conversations. It’s our secret sauce.

(And remember when we mentioned how easy it is to track your call centre's performance without needing extra analytics software…)

Long story short, Dialpad lets you create a fully virtual call centre with agents working from anywhere (well, anywhere with good internet).

Dialpad’s also perfect for sales, since you can get both local and international numbers for sales reps in different territories, and the automatic data backup ensures the highest levels of security for your system as a whole.

And for customer experience teams? You can track the quality of customer service your team is providing in real time with Ai-powered CSAT on 100% of calls—not just the 5%-ish average response rate from traditional IVR CSAT surveys:

You can also get deep call centre metrics in real time, in addition to providing omnichannel service across voice, digital, and social media channels:

TL;DR - Do you have a small contact centre team that needs to punch above its weight? Dialpad Ai Contact Centre is your best option.

Features that small businesses love:

• Dialpad Ai, which provides accurate, real-time transcriptions of calls and voicemail

• Easy IVR and call routing setup and customisation

• Simplified quality management for supervisors

• Ai CSAT / SMS survey options

• Call centre recording and live screen capture

• Real-time automations to streamline workflows like RTA cards

Best for: Small to medium businesses that want an easy-to-set-up and customisable call centre platform

What customers think of Dialpad

Don’t just take our word for it, either—take a look at what some of our customers have to say:

“On match days, I may be managing an event or in another part of the stadium, but my team can always pass a phone call to me and I can accept without needing to be in front of an actual computer.” - Deirdre Roraduri, Membership Service & Events Specialist at Western Australian Cricket Association

“One thing that I love in Dialpad is the call journey feature, where you can see where calls were routed, forwarded, and changed. It’s beautiful, and brought a lot of peace of mind to our call centre operations—there’s no more wondering where a call came from or how someone got it.” - Sahil Farooqi Arthur, Head of Customer Care at Rently

“Dialpad gives us the ability to change our call centre ourselves — without interruption and within minutes.” - Mike Monteiro, Communications System Manager at EF Education First

2. Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud is another hefty player in the contact centre space, specifically serving mid-size and large enterprises.

They count PayPal and Ticketmaster among their customers, and yep, those are huge organisations.

That being said, they're an established customer service platform and if you have the budget and resources to manage a system with ticketing features and complex workforce management tools, Genesys Cloud could be an option.

Due to the huge range of features, Genesys Cloud may be too complex for some users, and some people have reported difficulties with basic everyday use.

Features:

• Customer self-service automations

• Live chat

• Business analytics

• Communication management software

Pricing: Starting at $98 for Genesys Cloud CX 1¹

3. Five9

Five9 is another well known name in the contact centre software space. You’ve probably heard of it, and for good reason—they’ve been around for a while.

The thing is, their user interface reflects it. (Zoom did try to acquire them back in 2021, but it didn’t go through.) Plus, you don’t have a single dashboard that your agents, supervisors, and admins can all look at (like with Dialpad).

And if you have a work-from-home team of call centre agents, you’ll probably want a mobile-first (or at least a strong mobile app experience) for folks who are working remotely. We'd recommend checking out Five9's mobile experience for yourself—if your team doesn’t use their cell phones for work, this might not be an issue for you.

Features:

• Predictive dialling

• Upselling screen-pops on demand

• Dedicated management tools

Pricing: Available on request²

4. UJET

UJET is a relatively new player in the contact centre space. Its messaging is heavily focused on the omnichannel customer experience, so it’s worth checking out if you’re looking for a platform to bring all your different channels together.

The drawback is that some users have reported technical issues like mic muting and even calls dropping (sources linked) in G2 reviews.

Features:

• Embedding mobile app

• Allows customers to share photos and videos in chat

• Integrates with popular CRMs

Pricing: Starts at $65 USD per month³

5. Aircall

A phone service that also offers customer service tools, Aircall features include the likes of caller ID, call recording, customer interaction history and conference call ability.

Their phone system makes it possible for companies of different sizes to deal with customer questions from around the world. Some problems have been reported around call quality and a long wait for customer support.

Features:

• Access to local phone numbers

• A recording feature

• Real-time tracking and analytics

Pricing: Starts at $30 USD per user per month⁴

6. Talkdesk

User-friendly and easy to add to your existing processes, Talkdesk is specially designed to manage the workflows of big organisations and enterprises.

You can use it to manage queues, view other agents’ statuses, and collaborate on notes to monitor customer touch-points. It’s worth noting that there have been issues reporting with slow-running screens and poor call quality at times.

Features:

• Customisable call queues

• Automatic call distribution (ACD)

• Interactive voice response

• Single-click integration with CRMs

• Performance and workplace management

Pricing: Available on request⁵