Call Manager is a unified call control center from Cisco that supports enterprise collaboration functions across the spectrum of IP telephony, video & web conferencing, and messaging. Features include call forwarding, call back, call transfer, ad hoc conferencing, and call park.
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FluentCloud
Score 9.6 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
FluentCloud, from FluentStream Technologies, is a dynamic, cloud-based business phone system. FluentCloud includes FluentStream's leading phone system, phone service and customer support team, all in one. The FluentCloud product aims to provide businesses with new telecommunications flexibility, with an emphasis on price and performance. In addition, the vendor offers a wide range of custom applications and communications integration strategies to businesses and software…
Unlimited calls to the US and Canada, first-class quality and 99.99% uptime US-based customer support team and fully customizable plans with “A-La-Carte” options.
The Cisco Unified Communications Manager platform would be most suited for the below scenarios. 1. An organization with very restricted policies and compliance where can't move to cloud-based solutions for data security. They can install the CUCM on-premises. 2. An organization that is still on a legacy phone system could adopt CUCM to save costs and have better services.
I have tried a few programs over the years to record and track calls and this one is by far the best. Easy to use and more functions than I will ever use. I love the reporting options. There was one particular scenario that comes to mind where I was glad to have FluentCloud. I had a client that was really really angry, cussing, yelling, threatening suit, etc. because he had gone to an appointment almost 2 hours away and when he got there the woman told him that we forced her to schedule the appointment, that we were pushy and rude and she just wanted to get off the phone. Thankfully I found the recording and was able to prove to him that she DID schedule the appointment but she also picked the day and time, answered all of the questions and took absolutely no persuasion at all. Basically it was an easy close. The client couldn't believe it and still to this day he is my client.
Allows us to record thousands of calls per day. As far as I know there is no cap, at least we haven't hit it yet.
I really like that I can pull reports/recordings several different ways. I can search by caller name/extension, or by phone number, or by date and time of the call, etc. Very easy to use dashboard.
I also like that we can set security options to where certain people might have more access than others. We have it set up so that the caller can only access and see his/her own calls, but the trainers can see themselves and their team, and then higher management has access to all calls in or out.
FluentCloud is super easy to use, absolutely does everything we need it to.
CUCM is overly complex and requires a very capable engineer to maintain it. Similarly, implementing anything new requires a great deal of specialized knowledge of CUCM.
CUCM is difficult to troubleshoot because of it's complexity.
CUCM is expensive licensing and they nickel and dime you with a plethora of tiny little license charges for every little feature. They have the most convoluted licensing models, ever, for their CU products in general.
The whisper coach and other trainer features are a bit frustrating as the caller has to be on a current call to connect and each monitoring session only lasts for the length of that one call. An improvement could be made to allow a trainer to continue piggybacking on the monitored extension, so they can listen to a trainee for as long as they choose.
The recording system has had some hiccups recently where the recording quality is so bad as to be unusable. They have fixed this issue a few times, hopefully it doesn't pop back up. Along the same lines we have had a few occurrences where recordings we not available to review until 4 or 5 hours after the cal.
At this time there our research has found that feature for feature there isn't a better solution for our needs at this cost point. We have had great success and don't foresee a need to change
Although it's very easy to use, once you understand the concepts of IP telephony, as I said before, I think Cisco could have improved the management interface of the platform, adding modern technologies and the design language of the other platforms like DNA Center, etc. This interface hasn't had a substantial improvement for about 10 years
CUCM is supported by most third-party vendors for related products, so it makes finding solutions to specific needs easy. Also Cisco TAC is very knowledgeable, and we have never run into a problem they have not been able to resolve. Usually they are resolved without the need to escalate tickers either.
The Cisco Call Manager application has been around for much longer than many of the competitors. As such, they have had plenty of time to resolve bugs and increase the feature set that comes natively with this solution. One of the biggest factors for us was the professional services/support that comes along with using any Cisco product.
I have used others besides what is listed below but FluentCloud is by far the best I have used, especially when it comes to tracking and reporting call volume and production of our calls. Being a call center that is production based on call volume having something like FluentCloud is essential.
