Best Call Centers and Answering Services for Businesses for 2020

Update: This page has been updated to reflect the COVID-19 pandemic and disaster services offered by call centers and answering services that can keep businesses communicative throughout the coronavirus crisis.

No matter what kind of business you run, you need customers in order to survive and thrive. Historically, customers have relied on one channel of communication above all others to contact businesses with questions, requests and complaints: the phone. Unfortunately, managing the phone lines is a labor-intensive process that can become costly to manage in-house, especially for small businesses with limited resources. Luckily, call center services allow businesses to outsource their customer service department in a professional and transparent way.

As the name suggests, call center services specialize in the management of your phone lines. At their most basic, they capture information from incoming callers, take down messages and respond to frequently asked questions. For these services, agents typically rely on a branded script your company provides. They can also perform more advanced services, such as order management and payment processing. If you're looking to run a customer outreach campaign, many call center services also offer outbound services, which can support your marketing campaigns and generate new leads.

However, call center services don't stop at the phone lines. Many call center services are rebranding as contact centers, as they take a holistic approach to customer service. In addition to incoming and outgoing phone calls, contact centers handle email, social media and live web chat. Leveraging these channels for a unified customer service department has never been easier.

If you need a partner to ensure your customers receive the care they've come to expect from your company, a call center service might be right for you. This guide includes key information on what to look for in a call center service and how to choose one that best suits your brand. It also includes reviews of some major call center services on the market today, as well as our best picks – companies that stand out from the crowd.

Many customers simply don't like to place a customer service call, preferring text-based services. It's no surprise, then, that live web chat services are expected to grow by 87% over the next 12 to 18 months. Live chat has long been a nice option to add to your website, giving your customers another way to contact customer service agents. However, it is becoming a must-have, especially for potential customers interacting with your brand for the first time. More than 41% of all customers prefer live web chat, while 50% of mobile users look for the feature when visiting a website. Offering this channel is a way to stay competitive and boost customer satisfaction, especially when fielding initial questions from a potential buyer. Call center services have largely integrated live chat services into their features and can help you set up the channel, embed it on your website, and provide an agent to manage incoming customer requests.

Artificial intelligence continues to be a key driver of growth in the call center service industry, especially when it comes to interactive voice response. IVR is the automated phone trees that callers often encounter when contacting a customer service department. IVR with AI and machine learning enables better recognition of caller accents and intonation, and supports more efficient call direction to the appropriate agent and department.

AI isn't just becoming a mainstay for IVR; it is essential to mine data that improves your insights into customer needs and satisfaction. Call center services are increasingly offering access to data-driven reports that support better decision-making around marketing, customer service delivery and even inventory management. Quality assurance in the modern business world relies on data, and machine learning is essential to make the troves of data that businesses capture every day useful.

March 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic forced many small businesses to suspend operations or shift to a remote work model in March. Many call centers and answering services offer disaster recovery plans and service continuity capabilities that can keep small businesses in touch with their customers, vendors and employees during times of natural disaster, including the spread of illness. Read our guide to how call centers and answering services can keep your communications online during a disaster.

We take the process of recommending vendors seriously, so we invested substantial time in researching various call center services and their features. We gave each company equal consideration.

Locating the Best Services

We started the process by coming up with a comprehensive list of vendors that offer call center services. To do this, we searched the web and consulted other lists and reviews of the most popular vendors. We ended up with a list of more than 50 call center and answering services to examine further.

Choosing the Best Services

From there, we visited the websites of each vendor to compare pricing and features. We looked at all the details, including inbound services, outbound services, invoice requirements, call minimums and additional features. We used this information to narrow down our field of candidates to more than a dozen finalists.

Researching Each Service

Next, we contacted all the services we were considering, posing as a customer. We wanted to go beyond the marketing rhetoric and get a feel for how the companies handle actual customer interactions. We asked each customer service rep the same set of questions about features, options and pricing, and we noted our reactions to the experience. Company representatives who were friendly and forthcoming got higher marks, and those who were less than helpful or too pushy scored lower.

Analyzing Each Service

For our overall best picks, the decision came down to which companies offer the best balance of affordability, useful features and effectiveness of call center agents.