Dialpad vs Aircall vs JustCall vs RingCentral (What VoIP Phone Should I Use?)

The Incumbent: RingCentral

Think of RingCentral as the "Salesforce" of the VoIP world. They "integrate" with almost everything (what that even means is many things...), does that mean it'll do what you want it to do? Great question! They have all the standard business VoIP features—company department lines, employee lines, SMS/MMS, IVR menus (press 1 for x department, press 2 for...). It's not a question of features—they've been around for a while.

Okay, that all sounds great! Right? But what's RingCentral like to actually use? Well, painful (I'm finding myself writing more and more about the "joy" component to using software). There's zero joy in using it. It feels like you're using archaic and unintuitive software. Why is this the case? Well, like Salesforce, since there are such gigantic enterprises on RingCentral, they are in that messy area where they really can't innovate much without upsetting their highest paying enterprise customers who ultimately just want things to "stay the same".

I've personally implemented RingCentral to a myriad of teams 6+ years ago (some of which are still using it to this day), and well, I regret it (now). At the time, we all got sold on their "native integration" marketing shpeal. Although, to be fair to past Alex—at the time RingCentral's largest competitors were not even cloud-based, so they were a huge upgrade at the time. The setup process at the time was (and still is) incredibly painful. They expect to be working with an IT department, not an agile team. So they used to be a great solution, but are really getting eaten alive by the more modern software listed below—lets move on.

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The AI Innovator: Dialpad 🌟

Dialpad is the only VoIP listed here that actually feels like a modern VoIP solution built for the teams actually using the tool (but also scaleable to companies of all sizes). Of everything listed here, we chose to use Dialpad internally—which should tell you something.

Their desktop app feels modern. Their mobile app feels modern. While all of these othes

The real standout features of Dialpad are their AI capabilities. They are large enough to where they've been able to acquire and natively bake in a voice AI company. What this allows for is powerful features like sentiment analysis, which makes reviewing calls a complete joy.

Unfortunately, A2P (Application to Person) messaging is starting to get worse and worse, and Dialpad now charges on-top of your monthly fee for sending messages. This is because businesses have taken advantage of the P2P (Person to Person) messaging, and carriers and the government have stepped in.

At the end of the day, Dialpad is still the best tool in the space, and is worth the investment if you need a VoIP in your business. It enables API access, which allows you to do things like automatically logging SMS and calls + recordings into your CRM—something that will never exist when using a traditional P2P phone number. It also provides a more work/business focused number for the occasional call with a customer and business-focused relationship tracking.

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The Na

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JustCall limitations—Just thinks it should be click-to-dial from the CRM (e.g. Copper)—test Dialpad Chrome Extension, he said there's too much friction around calling from Copper. They also said that the call and SMS logging is a bit inconsistent (sometimes it doesn't work), will explain that is normally the case with native integrations as they don't often have the proper re-triggering system set up.

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Help Scout on the other hand can be best described as a customer-centric tool. They have done an incredible job at building somewhat of a community around their software. For example, when I see a company is using Help Scout (on either the website chat or email response), I have an immediate reaction of feeling that they care deeply about customer support and will have equally caring support reps. I'm part of their "Support Driven" Slack community as well and am regularly seeing teams of all sizes (big and small) actually switching over to Help Scout from Zendesk and Intercom, among others.

They have a nice implementation of live chat in their product as well, it's actually thoughtful (and further customer-focused). How you might ask? Expectations matching. For one, you have to mindfully to mark yourself as "available", and if you aren't actively in Help Scout for a long enough period of time, it will automatically mark you as "away" (wait that's a feature...? hold on, let me explain). There's nothing worse than having a "live chat" on your website that gives the impression that you'll get an immediate response, but in reality, you just get a bot that asks for your email address because "the team is away". It's a bad expectation mismatch. Help Scout doesn't allow this to happen.

They have more of an "email first" approach, with a "we might be live though" as a secondary. So when the live chat shows on your website, you can be sure that there's actually a human on the other end. Great expectation matching, which as a small team, I appreciate a lot. Now take that, versus Intercom, which simply upon seeing the logo, you and everyone else expects to speak to someone immediately, and if you aren't on the other end, they get frustrated - you're set up to lose versus surprise and delight (which is what Help Scout constantly allows for). If you're a small team, why not set yourself up for success and delight out of the box?

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The "SaaS" Live Chat: Intercom

Intercom is great, but is quite expensive for what you get, and it's super live chat focused. Something I'm regularly reminding small businesses of is that having a live chat has a huge (hidden) cost associated with it, especially as a small team. It brings with it anxiety of responding (had one client that wouldn't use the restroom out of fear they weren't there to respond to a customer shortly after implementing Intercom into their business. Yep, it's safe to say that it didn't last very long for their small team, they are no longer using Intercom. They also charge based on number of contacts and the various components (features) and it gets wildly expensive very quickly. They are great though and the industry standard for live chat (if you can justify having a few full-time employees to manage your live chat).
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The All-In-One: Front

My main question here is, are you planning on having your social channels and chat apps as your main source of support? I mean really, think about that question deeply. I understand that the gut reaction is "yes, that would be great!" - but maybe those 5 customers of yours that prefer to message you via Facebook Messenger or Twitter DM's shouldn't be the sole cause of fragmentation across support channels, requiring you to then use a tool like Front to rope it all back in. So ask yourself, just because you "can" open up your support channels, "should you"?

If the answer is "yes", then that's where I can vouch for Front, but again, you're accepting support fragmentation, and good luck roping that back in in the future. Again, if you're a small team, you should probably have a primary and centralized support channel, usually "[email protected]" - that way you can better control routing and tracking feedback.

Also, if you're like us and you love using Superhuman for your direct emails, you're not going to benefit from the other features of Front, like "shared inboxes" and such across the team. You really need to use Front as your main email inbox to get the most use out of it.
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Customer-Centric Companies

What does "Customer-Centric Companies" even mean? Okay, well product aside for a moment, Help Scout has somehow managed to get the companies that have the most customer-focused support teams onto their software. Time and time again, I am constantly blown away by the support I receive from companies that just so happen to be using Help Scout. In a way, it inspires me to always "do better" and go above and beyond with my own customers. Companies using Help Scout seem to attract employees that genuinely care about their customers, treat their employees well, leading to genuinely happy experiences, and conversation exchanges that make you forget your frustrations when reaching out to support. You're not a "number", you're a human, and you're talking to another human, it's great.
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To list a few of the companies that I am describing above:

• Zapier (shout out to Christian) wait, what... you know their name? exactly
  
• Postmark (shout out to Brian)
  
• Superhuman (shout out to Carlton) — believe it or not, Superhuman used their own software for their support channel for the first couple years in business! (aside: totally jealous, that sounds fun), but as they scaled (didn't take much), it was incredibly clear that Superhuman wasn't meant to be a help desk and it wouldn't work, so they switched to (big shocker) Help Scout and have been happy with it ever since.
• Help Scout (obviously - just wanted to shout out Kelly)
  
• Efficient App (come on, of course we're going to put ourselves on this list) 😅
  

So with that, you're in good company, and if you've used any of the above services and have reached out to their support team, I'm sure you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

By using Help Scout, whether or not you like it, you're joining a "customer-centric support community". What do I mean? When I see companies using Help Scout, I can't help but just feel connected to them - just like that, they feel like a friend. Somehow Help Scout has managed to do this and it's not surprising given that they invest a lot into CS research, education, and they treat their employees really well.

In terms of features, they have a super easy-to-use workflow automation feature that allows you to easily prioritize conversations, assign tickets, move between mailboxes, etc. think of Gmail filters on steroids. You can even build a workflow that runs with the click of a dropdown item (you can choose to have this be a manual or automated workflow). For example, I have certain types of conversations automatically tagged (and I use the purple color tag to insinuate that a "manual workflow" should be ran, and then I have "Approve" and "Deny" which runs through and removes a tag + adds a tag + marks the conversation as "closed"). So it makes building out processes work really well:

Anyway, I'm sold, how do I try it? Visit this page and scroll down to "promo code" section for an extended free trial & $50 credit.

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Does It Integrate Though?

Of course! Check out the Help Scout Integrations page to see all the integrations we've built. We've built a pretty rad integration between Copper + Help Scout that logs new support tickets (along with the link to access that conversation) directly into the CRM activity log under the customer, along with any support notes.

We also have our own internal custom integration between Help Scout + Asana which creates a task for a new support ticket, and automatically pushes updates from Help Scout (like status changes and assignee) and updates the task within Asana.

Let us know if you want to learn more about this!

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