CloudTalk alternatives: What to look for and which competitors are the best

When it comes to assessing CloudTalk alternatives, exploring the different options can be a tall task.CloudTalk is a great solution for many businesses—but if you’re looking for omnichannel communications with built-in AI to maximise your team's productivity, there are some potentially better options on the market.This article will analyse how CloudTalk and some of its competitors stack up against one another—leaving you better placed to pick the best option for your business.

What is CloudTalk?

Before we look at CloudTalk alternatives and competitors, let's examine CloudTalk itself.CloudTalk provides cloud-based telephony and call centre software that incorporates more than 70 productivity tools for improving your business communications and streamlining the call management process.It offers phone numbers for over 160 countries and call recording and analysis tools to help track the performance of agents.It allows businesses to automate part of the customer experience with its Interactive Voice Response (IVR), call flow designer tool, VIP queuing, and preferred agent features.For end users, CloudTalk is relatively straightforward to use. Agents can make and receive calls either from their desktop browser or using CloudTalk’s mobile apps. And call quality with CloudTalk is generally considered to be solid.All-in-all, CloudTalk is not a bad choice for supporting your business if you’re focused on finding a telephone-only solution.So, why would you want to look at a competitor instead?

What to look for when choosing between CloudTalk competitors

It’s not all about phone features and voice calls! Today, most businesses will need something more robust than just your average call centre software to provide truly exceptional customer service.

An omnichannel customer experience

Customer interactions with businesses involve a wider variety of channels than ever before. Phone calls, live chat, social media, email, SMS—these are just some of the ways that customers are contacting businesses.Each business must consider how it can provide an omnichannel customer experience if its customers are regularly reaching out through different voice and digital channels.Think about your sales pipeline and customer support agents: which channels do your customers use? And what about in-house communication between colleagues? Is everyone still just using voice calls? Likely not.Dealing with all these different channels using separate devices and apps can quickly become challenging and unwieldy, and that impacts the productivity of your teams (and your budget, since you'll be paying for a bunch of disparate tools).You need to make it as easy as possible for agents to support customers, whichever channel they use. It's important to remember that not all business communication platforms can manage an omnichannel experience—most call centre solutions only allow agents to take phone calls and won't have video conferencing or digital channel (think WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and so on) support.For example, CloudTalk is fine for phone interactions but offers no video call functionality,¹ which means you won't be able to provide omnichannel customer service using it. If you want a unified communication solution that supports more than phone calls, then CloudTalk may not be for you.

Depth of integrations

If your business uses a variety of different apps, such as a CRM, Google Workspace (or Microsoft 365), helpdesk software, or other tools, integrations should be a key consideration.With well-built integrations, you'll be able to make a phone call from within your CRM, have data automatically synced between tools, and more. The end result of almost integrations? Time (and resources) saved because they should reduce the manual data entry work you have to do.

Built-in artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is redefining so much of how business is done. Powerful contact centre AI tools can increase your sales, improve the performance of marketing campaigns, and uplevel your customer support—without overburdening your agents. And there is absolutely no reason why this is only for the big players. There will be ways it can benefit any business.Once again, there is substantial variation between the different business communication platforms. Very few offer built-in AI or have AI at all—while most solutions integrate with AI software to tack on that functionality in their product.
If you're interested in a contact centre solution that can transcribe calls and analyse sentiment in real time, track how often certain topics and keywords come up in conversation, and so on, then you should look at the AI-powered contact centre options below.Dialpad, for example, comes with Dialpad Ai, which powers its real-time call transcriptions, live agent coaching, and automated post-call summaries:

Confidentiality compliance

Some sectors have particularly strict confidentiality regulations for customer data. But not all communication platforms support such compliance. Make sure you consider this aspect for your business, too.

Value for money

Value for money is, of course, a major factor. Affordability is crucial. But the best value for money is not the same as the cheapest price.

Providers tend to offer different pricing plans. Dialpad, for example, offers a Standard plan and a Pro plan—each offering different tiers of functionality. Some even offer basic free plans, including just a stripped-back feature set.

Take a look at the features on offer and consider your business’s needs. (If you’re keen to expand your team globally in the near future and don't want to have to keep upgrading or switching between solutions or providers, then opting for a very limited free option doesn’t make much sense.)

The top CloudTalk alternatives to choose from in 2023

1. Dialpad: An AI-powered customer intelligence platform that lets you cover every channel

Dialpad can meet all your communication needs in one package, with a wide range of communication channels including voice calling, team messaging, meetings, video conferencing, and even digital customer channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

If you want to connect your team to your customers and each other using a single solution, Dialpad is designed for exactly that purpose (and there is robust contact centre functionality as well if you need it).

It’s also easy to use, with a user-friendly interface. For example, adding new users (or even a new contact centre) takes just a few minutes from the online dashboard:

And it offers comprehensive customer service via a range of support channels too, in case you do run into any technical questions. On the Pro and Enterprise plans, you get 24/7 support on the phone and live chat.

Seamless integration and maximum mobility

Dialpad pulls all your communications, both with customers and in-house, together into a fully-synced, coherent thread, and allows you to easily switch between channels and devices.

Imagine you have a phone call with a customer, and you subsequently send them an SMS message. You'll be able to see this entire conversation history in one place:

Need to step away from your desk? With Dialpad, you can flip a call in progress seamlessly from your computer to your mobile phone (or vice versa) without dropping the call.

Integration with other platforms

Dialpad integrates with a wide range of major platforms that businesses use, including Google Workspace, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

Not only does this let your agents make phone calls from right inside their CRM without having to toggle back and forth, the integrations also automatically log calls and other activities inside the CRM:

Super-powerful AI

Last but definitely not least, one of the most unique things about Dialpad among other CloudTalk alternatives is its proprietary artificial intelligence, Dialpad Ai. It can:

• Transcribe all your conversations in real time

• Provide automated post-call summaries, including a list of action items

• Identify key terms that crop up in customer interactions

• Analyse customer sentiment on calls in real time

• Automatically pop up real-time assists for agents

Thanks to Dialpad's automatic speech recognition and natural language processing engine, it can not only provide real-time assists for agents, but also give supervisors real-time insights—all built right into its platform.

Pricing

The Ai Contact Centre plan has two tiers: Pro and Enterprise. Both come with 24/7 customer support on the phone and live chat. Reach out to our team to get a quote!

2. 8x8 Contact Centre

8x8 offers a business phone system, video conferencing, chat tools, and contact centre solutions.

It offers most of the features you would expect from a business telephony system, like call recording, voicemail, auto attendant, and other call handling and management tools.

You can also communicate with internal teams through the messaging and video conferencing features.

8x8 does include some analytic tools, reports, and dashboards, though you'll have to go up to the x8 Plan for more robust analytics and the least expensive x6 plan only covers voice—no digital channels.

Pricing

x6 Plan: Starts at £85 per user, per month (regular price); x7 Plan: Starts at £105 per user, per month (regular price); x8 Plan: Starts at £135 per user, per month (regular price)²

3. RingCentral Contact Centre

RingCentral is another unified and cloud-based communication platform that provides phone calls, video conferencing, and team + SMS/MMS messaging.

It offers all your basic phone system features such as call flip, call forwarding, and call routing. But the most important thing to note when it comes to RingCentral's call centre software is that it is provided through a third party vendor.

What this means is that even though RingCentral markets itself as having a "unified" communication solution, it's essentially bolting on two different pieces of software, which may result in a different user experience, and difficulties in getting customer support (since they may need to forward you to their call centre provider's team).

In terms of functionality, it’s a decent contender—just make sure to look carefully at the pricing tiers and ensure you’re getting the best value for your business.

Pricing

Reach out to their team for a quote on the contact centre plans.

Essentials: Voice only; Standard: Omnichannel; Premium: Omnichannel with Quality Management; Ultimate: Omnichannel with Workforce Engagement Management³

4. Aircall

Aircall offers cloud-based call centre software. It focuses on voice calls only, so if you’re looking for a solution that covers a range of different channels (e.g. video and messaging) it will probably not be right for you.

That said, for managing customer phone calls alone, Aircall is a viable CloudTalk alternative, offering a robust palette of tools. These include analytics features (to keep on track of your contact centre team’s performance) and real-time coaching functionality for supervisors. In addition, it’s easy to use with an intuitive interface.

Ultimately, its limited scope (voice call only) could be its strength if that is all you want. That said, it’s not cheap. If you want supervisors to have a live feed of team performance or more advanced analytics, you have to opt for the £40 per month Professional plan.

Pricing

Essentials: £25 per user, per month; Professional: £40 per user, per month; Custom: Call for a quote.⁴

What's the best CloudTalk alternative for you?

With so many CloudTalk alternatives out there, it can be hard to pick the best one. A platform may look good and offer a competitively priced entry plan, but what functionality do you actually get for that price?

If you’re looking for the best CloudTalk alternative that has robust built-in contact centre and sales AI functionality, it’s worth looking at Dialpad Ai Contact Centre, which gives you 24/7 customer support, omnichannel communication, and powerful AI features.

See how it works now!

¹cloudtalk.io/pricing/

²8x8.com/products/plans-and-pricing

³ringcentral.com/gb/en/office/plansandpricing.html

⁴aircall.io/pricing/