CINNOX vs RingCentral vs Talkdesk: In-Depth Review & Analysis

Traditional call centres are dead. While many businesses and solutions providers would shy away from acknowledging this fact, the numbers speak for themselves.  

Businesses with omnichannel customer engagement retain 89% of their customers.

Metrigy research notes that 22% businesses are changing their communications providers are doing so to obtain an integrated UCaaS (United Communications as a service) and CCaaS (Contact centre as a service) platform.

While the traditional call centres held the fort till recently to bridge the customer-business communication gap. It has become nothing more than an ancient relic that has lost its value over time.  

Traditional call centres followed a very monotonous practice where customers would engage with business only to seek resolution for their complaints. The engagement was pretty much limited to just one functionality i.e., customer support, and in most cases was a one-sided affair. Neither the customers, nor the customer facing agents benefit from such age-old solutions.  

Communication can never be viewed in isolation. It is an integral part of every business process both critical, and non-critical. When it comes to engaging with customers, a business can no longer afford to offer disconnected experiences.  

Similarly, customer facing agents are flag bearers of the business. By onboarding a UCaaS or CCaaS solution businesses can keep all communication, data, identities, and necessary tools integrated even when your teams are spread out across several departments and regions.

‍Decoding UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS

Like we explained at the beginning, businesses are seeking an integrated communication platform that supports both the customer support team, as well as other internal members from various business units.  

Now let’s understand what these acronyms mean and the powerhouse that your business can become by leveraging their capabilities. ‍

What is UCaaS?

UCaaS or Unified Communication as a Service is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses communicate more efficiently by integrating all communication channels into one streamlined, centralised system.

When the legacy and on-premise communication systems could not meet the collaboration needs of remote workers during covid-19 pandemic, UCaaS became the apparent SaaS-of-choice for large businesses. ‍

What is CCaaS?

CCaaS or Contact Centre as a Service is a cloud-based solution that provides businesses with the ability to manage and handle customer interactions across multiple channels, such as voice, email, chat, and social media. CCaaS solutions typically offer a range of features, including automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), workforce management, and reporting and analytics.

60% of businesses are expected to switch to a CCaaS solution by 2025.‍

What is CPaaS?

CPaaS or Communications Platform as a Service is a cloud-based platform that enables businesses to integrate real-time communication capabilities, such as voice and video calls, and instant messaging, into their own applications and workflows.  

A CPaaS solution typically provides a set of APIs that can used to build custom communication applications or integrate communication functionality into existing systems. CPaaS solution also offers a range of pre-built communication applications and tools, such as chatbots, intelligent virtual agents, and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, that businesses can leverage to improve their customer engagement.

Why your Business Needs a Unified Contact Centre

A unified contact centre makes it possible for businesses to manage customer interactions across multiple channels in a single, centralised system. This not only helps in improving customer experience, but it also increases workforce efficiency and provides real-time valuable insights and analytics that can be leveraged to make on-the-go business decisions and strategies.

When a contact centre is powered with omnichannel capabilities, it can greatly benefit a business in several ways.

- Improves Customer Experience

72% customers share a positive experience with at least 6 people. On the other hand, if a customer is not happy, 13% of them will share their experience with 15 or even more.

Businesses can provide seamless customer experience across multiple channels, such as voice, email, chat, and social media by leveraging omnichannel capabilities of a unified contact centre. Customers interact with a business through their preferred channel, and these interactions can be tracked and managed in a single, unified system. The way businesses interact with customers can make or break the brand.

- Increased Workforce Efficiency

Unified contact centres see at least 50% increase in agent productivity. That’s 2.9x average handle time improvement year-on-year and an 80% decrease in customer complaints.

A unified contact centre can help you in streamlining your operations by bringing together interactions, customer interaction data, productivity tools, and identities, into a single interface. This provides the agents a panoramic view of the customer journey without needing to jump between multiple tools. Having a coherent view can help in automating mundane tasks, leading to faster response times and lower costs.  

- 360-Degree Data Visibility

60% of failed attempts at first call resolution are due to an agent’s inability to access the right data.

A business can gain real-time, actionable insights into their customer’s behaviour, needs, and interactions through centralised analytics and reporting. This can help the business in identifying trends, measure performance, and make data-driven decisions to shape customer experience.

A retail business that operates both online and in-store can receive customer enquiries through multiple channels, such as email, phone, live chat, or social media. By implementing a unified contact centre with omnichannel capabilities, the customer support team would be able to manage these interactions in a single interface, providing a consistent experience to their customers, while reducing the risk of missed or duplicate enquiries through combined enquiry labelling. The business will also be able to keep a track of customer interactions and journey across various channels, gaining insights into customer preferences, needs, and behaviour.
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Characteristics of an Omnichannel Contact Centre

A modern contact centre for all purpose and intent is an experiential hub. Similarly, customer engagement can no longer be viewed in isolation as the sole responsibility of the customer support team.  

Contact centres have evolved over the years to cater to the changing needs of customers and businesses.  

An omnichannel contact centre provides a seamless and integrated customer experience across all available channels of communication. Irrespective of which channels the customers choose to connect with a business, they can expect to receive a consistent experience, without having to repeat themselves.  

Characteristics of an effective omnichannel contact centre include:

- Omnichannel Availability

With so many channels at their disposal, customers can choose to interact with businesses through any channels of their choosing, including phone, email, chat, social media, and more. A business needs to be equipped with the right omnichannel solution to be able to manage these barrages of communication without overwhelming their customer facing team. A unified communication interface that acts as a point of convergence for all channels, wherein the employees do not need to switch between multiple tabs or apps in order to engage with the customers can be considered as an ideal solution.
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- Agent Empowerment

Omnichannel contact centre empowers customer support agents with an integrated solution and centralised customer information that require to provide excellent customer service. This includes providing access to historical customer data, purchase history, customer personas from integrated CRM tools, and real-time coaching opportunity.

- Personalisation at Scale

When agents are empowered with critical customer data and a unified interface, where they can view the customer journey in its entirety, it becomes that much easier to weave a personalised experience at scale. From greeting customers proactively, to guiding them through the shopping experience on your website and identifying opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell your products and services, an omnichannel contact centre solution provides endless possibilities for tailored offerings.

- Collaborative Synergy

A unified contact centre encourages collaboration among customer support agents and other internal teams.  

Powered by an omnichannel solution, customer enquiries can be routed to the right team or experts instead of channelising it through customer support team. Customer-facing teams are not required to be subject matter experts. Their work requires them to understand a customer’s pain-point and quickly resolve the matter as smoothly as possible. Various internal teams, such as marketing and product can get involved in interacting with customers by provisioning a direct destination to their respective tags.  
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- Automation Through Virtual Assistant

Modern contact centres are growing increasingly reliant on using AI-powered chatbot to automate routine tasks, such as enquiry or call routing, resolution to commonly asked enquiries, etc. This frees up agents to focus on enhancing the customer experience and create more advocacy initiatives to retain existing customers. A unified contact centre supports doesn’t require developers to break their head over coding and programming chatbot into the communication platform, it usually comes in a codeless, plug-and-play model.
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- Real-time Data Visibility

An omnichannel contact centre gives businesses untethered access to key customer insights by providing a comprehensive view of the historical customer interaction data in sync with customer profile, sentiment analysis, behavioural data from a centralised data pool that enables businesses to make informed decision making. The data gathered from the human-AI collaboration afforded by convergence of data in a pool helps in making progressive predictions.
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- Localised Support

A cloud-based contact centre empowers businesses to go global even while operating from a single location. Going global with local presence does not mean a business needs to establish physical presence and build offices in different regions. Businesses can train and equip their customer support agents with local understanding to work remotely by leveraging modern contact centre tools that helps them effectively collaborate internally to deliver contextual and localised experiences to their customers across the globe from one location.
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- Security and Compliance

A modern contact centre is highly secure and compliant, where customer data is protection takes precedence over everything else. Backed by relevant regulations, such as GDPR, and data encryption. In order to secure customer data, contact centre capabilities enables staff administrators to regularly create a backup of data stored within the service and securely move them outside the solution, to their locally hosted servers or other preferred backup sites.

‍Best Omnichannel Contact Centre Solutions in the Market

After the recent debacle and bankruptcy of one of the most renowned traditional call centres, most businesses are in the market for an upgraded, new age, omnichannel contact centre solution.  

Now that we have learned about the plethora of benefits a new-age contact centre brings to the business, let us find the best solution for your business.  

We have put CINNOX head-to-head with two of our competitors – RingCentral MVP and Talkdesk to study the similarities and differences between these contact centre solutions.  

How does CINNOX compare to RingCentral and Talkdesk

RingCentral MVP users have often mentioned poor call quality, complex account management, lack of customer support, and difficulty in navigating through their interface as inconvenient and disadvantageous to them.  

Similarly, Talkdesk users have listed difficulty in purchasing numbers, lack of customer support, frequent call drops and poor call quality, and glitchy interface, and other issues among their primary concerns with the solution.  

CINNOX comes packed with more comprehensive capabilities than RingCentral MVP at the same price and is cheaper than the price charged by Talkdesk for its CX Cloud Essential solution.  
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CINNOX was recently named as one of the top 10 CX solutions in APAC by Marketing Tech Outlook magazine.

With our Omnichannel Contact Centre solution, your business can unify telephony, web, and social channels - voice (PSTN, VoIP), chat, email, video call, and popular social media touchpoints such as Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, and LINE, among others. It is easier to transcribe your audio calls to capture sentiment, track enquiries at a glance, and deliver superior customer experience by routing enquires effectively based on expertise.