Ring in the New Year with These VoIP Conference Call Services for Call Centers

The new year is just around the corner. Likely that means that your business is in a combination of holiday and planning mode. Since you’re already thinking about what to do about hosted VoIP for your call center next year, we’d like to highlight a few of the conference call services that have stood out this past year and that look promising for the coming year.

In this article, we’ll explore why Vonage, RingCentral, and Ooma, are the VoIP systems that call centers should be considering moving into 2020 and beyond.

Why Are Call Centers Opting for Conference VoIP for Service Center Solutions like Vonage, RingCentral, and Ooma?

Conference call solutions provided by Vonage, RingCentral, and Ooma are useful and desirable because:

• Easy Conference Call Scheduling – Because these leading VoIP solutions integrate with Office 365, dropping a meeting into a calendar, sharing a calendar with others, or sending clients/suppliers a meeting calendar invite is simplified. If the time or date of a conference call has to be updated, the invite is automatically updated across all participants.
• Simple Conference Call Sign On – As a result of using internet infrastructure, call centers can offer everything from a call-in number to a simple URL link to connect their meeting participants into the conference call.
• Any Device – VoIP conference calling has given the individual caller the flexibility to use their phone, their smartphone, their tablet, or their computer to connect into a conference call. This device flexibility makes it much more likely that a participant will have a device handy and the necessary connectivity to join in.
• Cost Efficiency – Feature-rich VoIP platforms such as Vonage, RingCentral, and Ooma have built-in conference calling capacity that far outpaces the more costly, infrastructure-heavy landline options.

Some of the other pro-business features made available through these premium VoIP solutions providers are:

• Call Monitoring
• Scheduled Callback
• Queues
• Call Recording
• CRM and Office 365 Integrations
• KPI Visibility
• Video Calls
• Flexibility and Customizability
• Hold Music
• Interactive Voice Response
• Ring Groups
• Backups and Compliance Archiving

How Can Conference Calling with Vonage, RingCentral, or Ooma Help You Get Through High Volume Days Like Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

High volume days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday provide complex challenges for call centers. To handle the flood of calls that inundate your business on those days, you have to do one of three things.

1. Hire and train temporary staff to step in and help handle the surge of call traffic.
2. Extend call wait times and lower level of service quality.
3. Implement technologies that can help streamline the processes and improve the customer call-in experience.

While no owner or administrator of a call center wants to voluntarily lower service quality or extend wait times, hiring more staff and/or leveraging VoIP enabled, Call Center PBX (Private Branch Exchange) systems for greater efficiency are attractive options for providing high-quality service on days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday when the service center is inundated with calls. As we look into the next year, the VoIP systems that we see business leaders gravitating toward are Ring Central, Vonage, and Ooma.

What Conference Call Features Do Vonage, RingCentral, and Ooma Offer?

When looking at call center solutions, functionality has to rank right up there along with cost. The reason that we have chosen Vonage, Ring Central, and Ooma as our VoIP providers to watch next year is that they each offer a rich set of conference call features.

Vonage Conference Call Features

• Mobile app
• Video conferencing
• Chat & chat rooms
• Share files with drag and drop
• Meetings that alert you by calling
• Simplified scheduling
• Up to 100 conference participants
• Industry-standard privacy settings
• Record meetings
• Reconnect automatically if call is dropped
• Switch between devices mid-call

RingCentral Conference Call Features:

• Dedicated conferencing bridge
• Unlimited conferences
• Simultaneous conferences
• Up to 1000 conference attendees
• Local call-in numbers for 50 countries
• Toll-free call-in numbers for 80 countries
• One-tap “go to conference” on smartphones
• Email or text message meeting invites
• Call recording
• Video Conferencing
• Change devices mid-call
• Interactive screen sharing
• Breakout rooms
• One-click scheduling

Ooma Conference Call Features:

• Call recording
• Multiple rooms
• Video Conferencing
• Dedicated conference bridge
• Granular control and reporting
• Toll-free call-in numbers
• Call-in from anywhere
• Unlimited conference participants
• App
• Web client
• Video call layout management
• Access controls
• Private and group chat functionality

Are You Nervous About Moving to a VoIP for Call Center Solution for Conference Calling?

Many call center owners and administrators have talked to us over the years about their concerns in switching from a landline-based business telephone system to a VoIP system for their service center. Understandably, some CEOs are nervous about VoIP, but they don’t have to be. We have taken the time to evaluate our communications with call center leaders, and we’ve discovered that their objections to VoIP for call center solutions fall into the following categories:

1. “VoIP is a newer technology, and I’m a little wary of new technologies.” – The truth is that VoIP has been around for nearly 20 years now and is used by everyone from the mom-and-pop store on Main street to fortune 500 companies.
2. “What I have is working for me.” – The reality is that landline-based systems are getting older and more expensive to maintain. Added to this is the pressure of a consumer that demands a high level of technological capability from the companies with which they do business. What may be working fine for your service center today, may soon become a hard to maintain dinosaur.
3. “I’ve never used VoIP before.” – Not many in business still use this rationale because they understand that if they’ve used Skype, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Facebook video chat, or iChat on their Apple device, they’ve used VoIP technology. In fact, most of the time that you call into a company now, your call is answered on a VoIP platform such as Vonage, RingCentral, or Ooma.

Whether your call center is new to using VoIP for call center conferencing or you have been leveraging the benefits of VoIP for some time now, it’s worthwhile looking into these three industry-leading VoIP providers as they continue to improve their conference call offerings into the next year. We would like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy new year and continued success in the new year.