Best Call Centers and Answering Services for Businesses in 2019

For small businesses, answering the phones while trying to keep day-to-day operations running can be burdensome. However, ignoring incoming phone calls is simply not an option. Poor customer service is a major way to lose business, so what can you possibly do to keep the ringing phones from disrupting your work? 

Call centers offer outsourced phone management solutions that take the burden of answering the phones and managing customer service off your shoulders. From simple answering services and message taking to comprehensive customer service, call centers offer options to suit the needs of any business. It's possible to outsource your entire customer service department, or you can simply make sure a friendly agent answers every call and passes the message on to you. 

Most call centers offer both inbound and outbound services, which means they not only take calls but can make calls on your behalf as well. The best services will boost customer satisfaction and retention and help you generate new leads that will eventually become customers.

To find the call center services you can trust with your business, we reviewed about 50 companies that offer inbound and outbound calling services. Here is a roundup of our best picks and an explanation of how we chose them.

Like every other industry, call centers are undergoing rapid technological development. One of the biggest steps in call center evolution is the integration of artificial intelligence into operations. While this trend has been ongoing for some years now, it's starting to reach a stage of development beyond the mere automation of mundane tasks and contextualization of previously captured data.  

AI today is making the shift toward what is known as predictive analytics. Traditionally, machine learning algorithms have been used to contextualize the massive amounts of data that call centers capture, but predictive analytics is much more advanced. The term describes AI's ability to develop data-based insights that anticipate a customer's actions or critique a call center agent's performance. It can be used to flag the most lucrative potential leads or identify agents who require additional training to be more effective. 

The driving force behind predictive analytics is developments to natural language processing. NLP allows machine learning algorithms to actually understand human speech, including intonation and pauses, to determine the most likely scenarios. If a customer is hesitant, for example, AI can pick up on that and identify the customer as less likely to buy. This process previously relied heavily on the variable of human intuition, but it now takes significantly less time with more accurate results. AI aims at one clear end for call centers: to make services more effective for customers and companies alike and to drive more favorable results. To that end, look for further evolution of AI systems in call centers through 2019.

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.