Top 5 Cloud Contact Center Providers for 2023

Cloud contact centers have become a must-have communications solution for businesses that need a unified multichannel presence. These centers evolved to replace on-premise hardware with web-based communication solutions such as Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), webchat, Short Message Service (SMS), email, WhatsApp, and more.

And while traditional call centers still exist today, many lack the flexibility and scalability of a cloud contact center provider. However, with application programming interfaces (APIs), modern-day businesses can develop complex cloud contact center solutions from existing traditional call centers without having to build and deploy new software from scratch.

Knowing you need a cloud contact center is one thing—the hard part is figuring out which one. Don’t worry: we’ve got you covered. Below, we’ll walk through a handful of must-have features and a few of our favorite cloud contact center providers. Before we get there, let’s quickly cover the benefits of adopting a cloud-based contact center.

Benefits of a cloud contact center

Here are the benefits you can expect when you move your contact center to the cloud:

• Improve customer experiences: Provide faster service on the channels your customers want instead of forcing them to use your legacy mediums.
• Scale your contact center: Add new channels in no time to scale up or down according to customer demands.
• Iterate quickly: Evolve your cloud contact center without negotiating with handfuls of vendors and waiting for on-premise installation.
• Expand reach: Take your customer service further with the advantage of cloud-based servers.
• Increase reliability: Upgrade your uptime to a 99.99% service-level agreement (SLA).
• Control costs: Take advantage of prebuilt APIs, source code, documentation, and tutorials to build more for less.
• Route intelligently: Connect your incoming service requests to the right agent as quickly as possible with attribute-based and priority-based routing.
• Collect insights: Track your call metrics and analytics to see where your contact center needs improving.

Must-have features of a cloud contact center provider

Don’t worry about all the latest bells and whistles. Choose a cloud contact center with the features your business needs. After all, this isn’t a competition between who has the most features—it’s about who has the right features. Here are the features we believe are nonnegotiable:

• Uptime: Find a contact center with an uptime greater than 99.95% SLA to ensure you’re always there when your customers need you.
• SIP trunking: Choose a solution with a SIP trunking service if your agents need a physical phone—this will provide unlimited, simultaneous call capacity without deploying traditional phone systems.
• Interactive voice response (IVR): Look for an IVR solution that lets you create customized greetings and menus in the web languages you know.
• SMS: Ensure your contact center has SMS capabilities because 9 out of 10 users want to communicate with your business through texts.
• Web interface: Make or receive calls directly from your browser or customer relationship management (CRM) software.
• Communication options: Choose a platform that lets you connect modern-day channels like webchat, video, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more.
• Smart routing: Find a cloud contact center with intelligent routing logic to help you assign the right agents to the right customer as fast as possible.
• Mobile support: Look for a provider that lets you connect with customers via your mobile app (even if you don’t have one yet).
• Advanced analytics: Track your incoming and outgoing communications to learn about agent performance, marketing spend, and trends.

Top 5 cloud contact center providers

1. Twilio Flex

Twilo Flex is the programmable contact center developers have been waiting for—and it’s here. It lets you build a custom-made cloud contact center with support for email, voice, webchat, SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. With it, you can monitor all your channels from a single user interface and create intelligent routing to connect inbound customers faster. Plus, connect all your applications and CRM to Twilio Flex with third-party integrations and powerful APIs.

2. Talkdesk

Talkdesk is an all-in-one cloud contact center product that provides an easy-to-use, back-end interface to build the solution you need. Users can take advantage of automation, artificial intelligence, and self-service omnichannel options to provide improved and streamlined customer experiences.

3. Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect is an enterprise-grade contact center solution that provides out-of-the-box features to get your communications up and running. Built upon the Amazon Web Services ecosystem, it ensures reliable uptimes and allows you to build an omnichannel presence across multiple communication channels.

4. CloudTalk

CloudTalk is a call center software solution that focuses on call-based support. It doesn’t provide omnichannel options like SMS, chat, or video, but it delivers one of the best experiences for contact centers that provide call-only customer support. With it, you’ll get powerful call management features, intelligent call routing, and advanced phone analytics.

5. Five9

Five9 provides an easy-to-use environment for building your contact center solution. It’s not as robust or customizable as Twilio Flex, but it delivers predesigned templates, integrations, and simple features to help you provide omnichannel support for your customers. Five9 also has a strong reputation for its reliability and pricing flexibility.

Build a custom-made cloud contact center with Twilio Flex

Don’t settle for an out-of-the-box contact center that dictates how you and your employees work. You deserve unlimited flexibility to change, adapt, and iterate while building a solution that better serves your business, employees, and customers. You deserve Twilio Flex.

Start building with Twilio Flex (free for 5K active user hours) and see the difference for yourself. Want a walk-through first? Schedule an interactive demo with an expert on our team.