Best Call Centers and Answering Services for Businesses for 2020

Update: We've updated our forecast in the "Call Center Service Trends to Expect in 2020" section concerning the growth of the call center outsourcing industry.

No matter what kind of business you run, managing the phone lines is a labor-intensive process that can become costly to manage in-house, especially for small businesses with limited resources. Call center services allow businesses to outsource their customer service in a professional and transparent way. To help you find the right call center service for your business, we analyzed more than 50 options, looking at everything from cost to features to help us decide which services we think are best.

There are a few different pricing models call centers can employ. These are the most common:

• Monthly subscription: A call center that charges a monthly subscription typically offers a package of minutes that cover all the inbound services the company offers.
  
  
• Per-minute rate: A call center that charges a per-minute rate will base your monthly bill on the time agents spend connected to your callers. These rates are typically below $1 per minute.
  
  
• Tiered pricing plans: Tiered pricing plans give clients access to more advanced call center features at the higher tiers. This is a less common billing method than monthly subscriptions and per-minute rates. 

Many call centers charge additional fees and maintain billing policies that could influence your final cost. For example, many call centers charge a one-time setup fee to activate your account. Others charge extra fees for certain holidays. Be sure to get a complete breakdown of additional fees a call center charges before signing up.

You should be aware of some common billing policies as well. One is known as "agent work time." This refers to the time an agent is filling out information related to your account when they are not actively connected with a caller. Some call centers bill for this time, which tends to inflate your bill.

Some call centers employ incremental billing, which means they round up the time of your calls. The industry's most common billing increment is six seconds, meaning a call that lasts one minute and one second would be rounded up to one minute and six seconds, appearing on your bill as 1.1 minutes. However, some call centers use excessive increments, rounding up as high as the nearest minute in some cases. It's important to understand incremental billing to avoid a significantly inflated bill. The best call center services bill second to second, only charging you for the time an agent was actually connected with a caller.

Costs can vary widely in the call center service industry. Nearshore and offshore call centers tend to be the least expensive, but there can sometimes be communication barriers between agents and customers. Many businesses opt to partner with domestic call centers, which are more expensive but tend to employ accent-neutral native English speakers. Costs also depend on the level of service your business requires and your anticipated call volume.

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. 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 are rebranding as contact centers, taking 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 the one that best suits your brand. It also features reviews of  our best picks – companies that stand out from the crowd.

Call centers offer a wide range of services that can be separated into two main types: inbound and outbound call center services.

Inbound Call Center Services

Inbound call center services cover any incoming calls. These are some common inbound call center services you might encounter:

• Message taking
• Live answering
• Call forwarding
• Order management
• Customer support
• Complaint hotline
• Employee call-out hotline
• Tech support

Outbound Call Center Services

Outbound call center services are when agents call prospects, customers, suppliers or anyone else on behalf of your business. These are some common outbound services:

• Lead generation
• Cold calling
• Polls and surveys
• Marketing campaigns

Shared Agents vs. Dedicated Agents

Depending on how sophisticated your call center service is, you can choose shared agents or dedicated agents to work on your account. Shared agents are significantly less expensive than dedicated agents and can perform simple services with the help of guidelines or a script. These services include taking messages, answering frequently asked questions and forwarding calls. Shared agents typically cost 70 to 90 cents per minute.

Dedicated agents are paid an hourly rate to work for your business only. They cost upward of $20 per hour, but they can fulfill much more advanced services, such as tech support and outbound marketing campaigns.

To blend cost-effectiveness with the personalization of dedicated agents, some call centers offer semi-dedicated agents. These agents cost a bit less than dedicated agents (usually $15 to $20 per hour) while still managing more advanced duties than shared agents. The difference is that they usually work with one or two other clients of the contact center in addition to your business, whereas dedicated agents are assigned solely to your account.

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. Many call centers have integrated live chat into their services and can 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 tree 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 for 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.

June 2020: A market report released by Technavio anticipates the global call center outsourcing market will grow by $13.54 billion through 2023, representing a compound annual growth rate of 3% for the industry. The report also acknowledges that the market is significantly fragmented and includes a wide range of service providers. North America leads the way, capturing 38% of the industry growth. One the major drivers of growth, according to the report, is robotic process automation (RPA), which involves the use of chatbots and interactive voice response trees to automate certain call center functions, such as customer identification and call routing.

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 about 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, noting our reactions to the experience. Company representatives who were friendly and forthcoming got higher marks, while those who were less than helpful or too pushy scored lower.

Analyzing Each Service

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

To better understand the call center services industry, we asked some of our readers which call center services they use for their businesses. Zach Passarella, marketing director at SMP Nutra, said his company uses VoiceNation.

"What we like about VoiceNation is that they are based in the U.S. and they allow for you to guide them on exactly how you want them to answer your calls," Passarella told Business News Daily. "They also have bilingual operators, [which] improves the ability to talk to everyone."

When Mursion decided to outsource its call center operations, it searched for a service that was suited for a startup company and based in the U.S. Robin Van Horn, Mursion's executive director of client services, said she and the company preferred a service based in Austin, Texas, so she could routinely be onsite for training and meetings. In the end, they settled on mindStart.

"From the first point of contact, mindStart was professional and helpful, and I never felt like I was being pressured," Van Horn said. "They took the time to really understand our needs (which were a bit nuts) and crafted a proposal on how to accomplish that within our budget."

Jacob Wedderburn-Day, co-founder and CEO of Stasher, said his company uses the small startup Supportify.

"They offer custom packages to new clients – so, for us, they handle call support and intercom messaging and anything that needs escalation to the operations team," he said.