The era of office work is no longer the norm, and neither is the traditional office phone. That’s where cloud-based phone solutions in the contact center and this Aircall review and alternatives come in.
As more companies shift to the work-from-home model, there is a growing reliance on both phone and remote communications. Companies need to keep up with customers’ evolving demands for more flexibility and autonomy in the customer experience – specifically, in how they receive information through customer service.
The same demands are coming from employees, too, as millions of employees within support teams adapt to technology that helps them continue working for their employer with the flexibility of remote work.
Table of Contents
What is Aircall?
Your business might need a sophisticated call center setup but doesn’t have the budget to set one up. Aircall, is a cloud-based contact center software that offers businesses their very own internal contact center without the cost of an entire operation.
Recently founded in 2014, Aircall helps businesses connect with callers across 50 countries and integrate seamlessly with countless apps, including – but not limited to – Salesforce. The company has experience providing reliable communication services to businesses across many industries, including healthcare, travel, financial, and IT sectors.
Why Aircall?
Customers give positive reviews about Aircall’s customer service and customer experience. With dedicated onboarding managers for every new business, Aircall assists every step of the way with port and network setup and headset configuration. Each manager has a robust dashboard that helps them support customers with solutions in real-time.
When it comes to calling solutions, reliability is essential. A missed call or poor connection can frustrate your employees and even give a poor impression to your clients.
Aircall can boast this incredible quality through consistent work with global voice carriers and local providers. They also use a strong back-end connection for each voice carrier, and their Opus codec helps them maintain quality even when the network is in flux.
Aircall Review
Aircall’s features
Aircall boasts a lot of features that customers enjoy. Here’s a list of each one and a bit about how it helps businesses with growth, productivity, and overall communication.
Call Conferencing: Businesses can boost collaboration with call conferences with up to 5 people through their VoIP solution.
Concurrent Calls: Concurrent calls improve business productivity by allowing employees to make or receive a concurrent call.
Queue Callback: Customers hate waiting, so a queue callback feature helps them feel more in control by opting out of a waiting line.
Call Routing: This function helps customers find the right representative for their inquiry through custom distribution rules.
Time-based routing: As a subfeature of call routing, it directs customer calls based on availability criteria to help ensure only employees on the clock receive the calls.
SMS Messaging: Businesses can improve their communication flexibility with customers through SMS messaging, allowing them to send, receive, and store messages.
International and Toll-Free Numbers: Businesses can create toll-free numbers or claim local and international numbers across 100 different countries, helping businesses connect with more customers or connect distributed teams more efficiently.
Cloud-Based Call Center: As a virtual contact center, Aircall hosts all of your contact information, including phone numbers and call history, in one place.
Call Recording and Call Monitoring: These features help businesses analyze data and improve operations. Call recording records conversations and helps you use the data to enhance your customer experience. Call monitoring helps you in the onboarding process, as employees can get better insight into their performance and how to improve.
Pause-Resume Call Recording: The pause-resume function is a subfeature within the call recording feature. With it, businesses can temporarily pause call recording (and inform their customers if necessary) to maintain flexible privacy.
Power Dialer: Sales dialers help you make quick consecutive calls automatically without dialing the numbers yourselves.
Call Tags: These help businesses make easy-to-access notes to improve follow-up activity on customers and leads.
Call Whispering: As the name suggests, whispering helps employees communicate with each other quietly even if they aren’t on another call.
CTI Integration and API: Computer telephony integration, or CTI, helps businesses boost productivity and efficiency through customized workflows.
Insight Cards: These help businesses assess context and performance for each inbound call by comparing it to relevant data from other apps.
Business Mobile Apps: Aircall’s business phone app helps you access all of its features from your mobile device, ensuring greater flexibility for businesses.
Click-to-Dial: This function is related to the power dialer and helps you dial phone numbers with only one click, boosting productivity.
Speakers help businesses hear every inbound call and improve customer experience through prompt response.
Best for:
Companies that do not rely heavily on Salesforce, with distributed teams, or with global customers
Pros:
- Basic Salesforce integration
- Impeccable customer service
- Strong call quality and reliability
- User-friendly interface
- Strong employee and customer satisfaction
- Flexible pricing plans
Cons
- SMS features don’t include images
- Is not native within Salesforce. If you use Salesforce, a native tool like Fastcall will do a better job.
Pricing
Aircall pricing includes three pricing structures depending on your business’s needs. Each tier and price includes different features.
Essentials: $30/user/month
- Three teams max
- Three users per team max
- Unlimited calls in Canada and the US
- IVR
- Click-to-dial
- 80+ integrations
- International calls at an additional cost
- Call queuing and call recording
- Extensions
- Conference calls
- Ring groups
- Flex call distribution
- SMS messaging
Professional: $50/user/month
- Three teams max
- Unlimited teams
- Salesforce Integration (basic)
- Advanced call analytics to meet custom needs
- Unlimited calling Canada and the US
- Call tagging
- Call Queue
- Power dialer
- Dedicated account manager and one-on-one onboarding sessions
- SMS messaging
- Call monitoring and call whispering
- Live feed
Custom: Contact Aircall for Pricing
- Unlimited calling worldwide
- Custom and advanced call analytics and onboarding
- API developer support
- Service-level agreement (SLA)
- VIP hotline for weekends and holidays
- Additional features based on consultation
Aircall Alternatives
Curious about what else is out there for cloud-based communications services? Maybe you’re wondering if there’s a decent alternative to Aircall. The short answer is yes, there is! Read on to learn the long answer and understand how other companies compare to Aircall.
Fastcall
Fastcall is a cloud-based communication platform that was designed specifically for Salesforce. From Day one the company was Founded in 2009 to integrate seamlessly with Salesforce. In the last decade, they’ve continued to evolve from their initial Version 1.0 to the most recent 7.50 Version, increasing their offerings to include outbound and inbound calls, SMS capabilities, data collection, and much more! All 100% in Salesforce.
Included Features
- Outbound calls
- Call routing and call transfer
- Customer recognition
- Custom dashboards
- Inbound calls
- SMS with merge and templates
- Video calls and conferencing
- Strong security features
- Information management
- Call recording with robust capabilities
- Sophisiticed call routing
- Phone and SMS support for Salesforce Mobile
Best for:
Salesforce subscribers.
Pros:
- Customers praise Fastcall’s impeccably seamless integration with Salesforce, as businesses using the CRM platform can easily link their communication functions.
- Quick response customer phone support
- Free 2-week trial
- Omnichannel support to meet varying customer preferences
- Concurrent calling and international calling for both inbound calls and outbound calls
- Advanced call analytics functions with custom dashboards
Cons:
No cons come to mind. The Salesforce AppExchange lists zero negative reviews for FastCall.
Pricing
Essential: $24/user/month
Pro: $49/user/month
Custom: to fit varying business needs
Nextiva
Nextiva’s cloud-based business phone system is world-renowned and respected, with
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak praising Nextiva’s services.
This platform offers various desirable features like call routing, IVR, and SMS text messaging.
Included features:
- Call recording and call monitoring
- Call conferencing and call queuing
- Toll-free and local phone numbers
- Advanced call routing
- Call transfer and call pulling
- Advanced call analytics
Best for:
Companies that host frequent, large web conferences across the globe
Pros
- Unlimited Canada and United States calling for remote and distributed teams, or otherwise global businesses
- Advanced call analytics and voice recording with Enterprise plan
- 9-person maximum conferences
- Chatbots for omnichannel support
- Basic Salesforce integration (no AppExchange package)
Cons
- Recent customer reviews cite missed calls and messages, which hurt customer loyalty
- Contract terms are largely inflexible, a con in today’s age of remote work and flexibility
- Some reviews cite friendly but very slow responses and resolutions from customer service teams
- No Salesforce AppExchange package
Pricing
Nextiva offers three pricing plans depending on your individual business needs and scenarios.
Essential: $18.95/user/month
Professional: $22.95/user/month
Enterprise: $32.95/user/month
Five9
Five9 is an American cloud-based contact center software that provides an intelligent business communication tool for businesses worldwide. Using AI, Five9 helps companies improve their communication and business processes with real-time insights and analytics. They boast 20 years of industry experience and over 2,000 global customers.
Included features:
- CTI and integration with Salesforce
- Omnichannel support
- IVR
- Call recording and call monitoring
- Automated workflows
- Speech recognition
- Customer tone analysis
- Sales optimization tools
- Click-to-Dial
- Power Dialer
Best for:
Large organizations with distributed teams
Pros
- User-friendly interface
- Easy integration with Salesforce
- Easy setup
Cons
- Some customers report long periods of downtime
- Salesforce AppExchange list has many negative reviews
Pricing
Five9 has five custom pricing packages to meet unique business needs for each client.
Core: Essentials, basic package with global connectivity, real-time reporting, and concurrent inbound and outbound calling
Premium: Core package plus quality management software with unique insights and performance management capabilities
Optimum: Core and Premium package capabilities plus improved WFO functions for successful team management and enhanced customer experience
Ultimate: Optimum, Premium, and Core package plus advanced call analytics and workflow automation capabilities
Five9 does not post its prices online. For specific quotes, you’ll need to contact their customer service team.
Ready to take the leap?
Businesses must adapt to changing customer expectations and technological advancements to remain relevant. For 2022, that means adopting robust and advanced call center software like FastCall or Aircall.
If you’re interested in learning more about how your business can use a cloud-based business phone system, we’d be happy to help. FastCall allows easy integrations and collaboration across international companies and offers fully customizable plans to help fit your business needs.
Contact FastCall today to take your business communication and VoIP service to the next level!
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