Top 5 Talkdesk Alternatives in 2024 based on 16,000+ Reviews

Figure: Type of AI for contact center operations that companies would prefer to use

Integrating artificial intelligence(AI) into your organization’s contact center is a must since 85% of worldwide organizations prefer AI-enabled tools in their contact center operations.¹

Talkdesk is an AI-enabled global contact center leader listed as number 8 in the annual Forbes Cloud 100 list, however, it might not be the appropriate contact center solution for your company due to its shortcomings (according to user reviews) such as not having skill-based call-routing, complex/insufficient reporting and documentation.²

For businesses that pursue a tailored cloud contact center software, this article will address Talkdesk and its top five Talkdesk alternatives through a detailed evaluation of each vendor.

Comparison of Talkdesk and its top 5 alternatives

*Based on the total number of employees on LinkedIn as of 11/14/2023.

**Based on the total number of reviews and average rating data on the Capterra, G2, and Trustradius software review platforms as of 11/14/2023. With Salesforce Service Cloud (sponsored) at the top, other vendors are sorted by total number of reviews in descending order.

***Starting price per seat/month, billed annually

Vendor selection criteria

While selecting the top five Talkdesk alternatives, we’ve narrowed down the vendor comparison list by only including the vendors that fit the following criteria:

• Number of reviews: 1,000+ total reviews on Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius.
• Average rating: Vendors with an average rating of more than 4/5 on Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius.
• Employee size: 700+ employees on LinkedIn

Talkdesk

Talkdesk is an AI-enabled cloud contact center software that offers contact center AI such as interactive voice response (IVR), speech recognition, and call routing.

Talkdesk’s cloud capabilities (workforce management and analytics, omnichannel engagement, customer support, and employee collaboration) are connected to its CX platform, which includes: low-code / no-code, conversational AI chat, self-service automation tools, 60+ pre-built integrations, 1,800+ companies around the world, (including Acxiom, Fujitsu, IBM) and 80+ AppConnect solution marketplace.³

Pros

Calls: The support teams indicate that Talkdesk has high call quality, and making calls regularly to customers all across the United States is convenient.⁴

Dialer: Users stated that the dialer is easy to use, it is stable when handling outbound and inbound calls, and there are no connectivity issues.⁵

ACD: According to users, the automatic call distributor immediately connects them with related agents.⁶

Cons

Call routing: Talkdesk lacks advanced routing features, and skill-based routing is not available.⁷

Reporting: Although Talkdesk has a tool to manage reports called “Explore”, it is still difficult to determine which report to run for users (many of the reports need to be sent, rather than viewed in the browser).⁸⁹

Features: There is no feature to report team performance with mail functions.¹⁰

Documentation: Some users think that the documentation could be more efficient, they also state that they expect to see more accessibility and documentation covering all the features.¹¹¹²

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5
• G2: 4.4/5
• Trustradius: 4.3/5

Pricing (starting price per seat/month)

• Essentials: $75.00
• Elevate:  $95.00
• Elite:  $125.00
• Enterprise: Contact Talkdesk
• A 30-day free trial is available.

Top 5 Talkdesk alternatives

1- Salesforce Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a cloud contact center product of Salesforce (an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California), established in 1999, and has over 70,000 employees and 150,000 product users globally.¹³

Service Cloud’s contact center automation may help organizations automate operations and repetitive tasks with its low-code/no-code capabilities.

To automate processes, Service Cloud offers an add-on tool called “Einstein” that can be connected to Salesforce’s cloud contact center system starting at $50 per user per month.¹⁴

Einstein can use contact center AI to assist organizations with: 

• Customer service chatbots: Handles activities like monitoring orders without the need for human intervention by using generative AI.
• Interactive voice response (IVR): Leverages large language models (LLMs) by using natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) to engage callers and give quick, customized support.  
• RPA (robotic process automation): Automatically evaluates documents or makes decisions on someone’s behalf for time-consuming tasks such as processing a data input.
• Knowledge bases: Allow AI to produce, organize, and offer self-service information.
• Omnichannel-routing: Uses case classification to route the questions from voice and digital channels — email, text, and social media — to the right agent.

Figure 1: Einstein bot calling a customer

Source: Salesforce¹⁵

Pros

Contact center functionality: Users report that Service Cloud is a robust contact center platform, since they can easily manage customer information such as incident records, contact records, and customer interactions on a single screen.¹⁶

Einstein Bot: Users provide positive credit to “Einstein”, stating that Einstein search features provide faster information mining for their agents.¹⁷

Customization: Users think that low-code/no-code capabilities make the software highly customizable.¹⁸

Cons

Reporting: Creating time-based or historical reporting can be challenging for some users.¹⁹

Pricing: Some users are concerned about the high operating expenses of Service Cloud.²⁰

Email integrations: Some users believe that Salesforce should improve its native email integration features as they do not always prefer to integrate their Gmail or Outlook accounts.²¹

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• G2: 4.3/5
• Trustradius: 4.4/5

Pricing (starting price per seat/month, billed annually)

• Starter: $25.00²²
• Professional: $80.00
• Enterprise: $165.00
• Unlimited: $330.00
• A 30-day free trial is available.

2- NICE CXone

NICE CXone is an AI-powered cloud-based contact center technology used by over one million customer support representatives and 85 Fortune 100 companies.²³

NICE CXone assists businesses with gleaming, centralizing, and analyzing all contact center data from various incoming and outbound phone calls, live chat, and voicemail. The platform also uses speech recognition, call routing, virtual assistants, analytics, call recording, and low-code / no-code technologies to enable organizations to foster a positive customer satisfaction strategy. 

Pros

Contracting: Users compliment the efficiency of the inbound and outbound contracting processes, noting that callers can request a return call or agents may organize a callback plan.²⁴

IVR platform: According to users, scripting and debugging the interactive voice response (IVR) screen is straightforward.²⁵

Reporting: Reporting is considered to be easy and helpful with the intuitive dashboard.²⁶

Cons

Call notifications: The duration between notifications for incoming calls is 3-4 seconds, users indicate that they are missing calls since the duration time is short and the call quality is low.²⁷

Dashboard loading: Some users have experienced frequent issues with the dashboard loading which causes users to reload the webpage.²⁸

Reporting: Prebuilt reports have no modification functionality.²⁹

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.2/5
• G2: 4.3/5
• TrustRadius: 4.1/5

Pricing (starting price per seat/month)

• Digital agent: $71.00³⁰
• Voice agent: $94.00
• Omni-channel agent: $110.00
• Essential suite: $135.00
• Core suite: $169.00
• Complete suite: $209.00
• A 60-day free trial is available.

3- Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud CX, used by 4,800 organizations in over 100 countries, is an omnichannel cloud contact center as a service with a centralized desktop and mobile interface for managing phone, chat, mobile, and online customer interactions (has access to AppFoundry market).³¹Genesys Cloud CX positioned highest in “Ability to Execute” (a quick way to help prioritize ideas worth acting on) according to the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for CCaaS report.³²The platform includes numerous features such as IVR, call routing, chatbot, AI, sentiment analysis, and analytics. 

Pros

Low-code/no-code: The architecture of the system enables users to quickly design workflows and IVRs with low-code and no-code implementations.³³

Call routing: Genesys Cloud CX’s call routing algorithms are appreciated by users, increasing their first-contact resolution rates.³⁴

Ease-of-use: Users agree that with Genesys Cloud CX, finding recorded calls, viewing dashboards and team member statuses, and using chat features is convenient.³⁵

Queue times: Queue times are long, according to one reviewer it takes  27 seconds for a customer to get to the queue.³⁶

Cons

Features: According to some users several basic use cases are not available with Genesys Cloud CX. For example, the option to use a phone number for voice and SMS communications is not provided.³⁷

Analytics: Users believe that the software’s statistical data reports should be more comprehensive, and employee performance metrics can display a higher number of queues per report.³⁸

Custom reporting: Users claim that Genesys Cloud CX does not allow them to specify what they want to see on exporting reports.³⁹

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• G2: 4.3/5
• TrustRadius: 4.2/5

Pricing (starting price per seat/month, billed annually)

• Genesys Cloud CX 1 (Voice plan): $75.00⁴⁰
• Genesys Cloud CX 2 (Digital plan): $95.00
• Genesys Cloud CX 2 (Digital + Voice plan): $115.00
• Genesys Cloud CX 3 (Digital + WEM plan): $135.00
• Genesys Cloud CX 3 (Digital + WEM + Voice plan): $155.00
• A 30-day free trial is available.

4- CallRail

CallRail is an AI-powered cloud contact center software with call tracking, call recording, and conversation intelligence (650,000 hours of AI-trained speech data) capabilities with more than 300 team members serving 200,000+ companies.⁴¹

CallRaill’s conversation intelligence tool automatically understands and examines all of your outbound and inbound calls by evaluating metrics such as pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, frequency of phone calls, customer interaction trends, or call length to determine which channels or leads are producing the most revenue for your company.

Pros

AI-call tagging: Users admire the automated AI-enabled call tagging feature.⁴²

Call routing: Users appreciated how smoothly the call routing works, allowing them to correctly monitor customer insights and analytics.⁴³

Phone numbers: Users appreciate the fact that CallRail provides different phone numbers for tracking, which is useful for SEM**** and social advertisements.

****SEM: Internet marketing is the advertising of websites through increased visibility in search engine results pages. 

Cons

Call whispering: The platform does not offer a “whisper”***** technology in the basic plan.⁴⁴

Call tracking: In CallRail the main function is call tracking, however, users point out the fact that the system malfunctions, sometimes the phone rings, and sometimes it does not.⁴⁵

Reporting: Some users believe that the reporting interface might be improved.⁴⁶

*****A call monitoring tool that enables you to listen in on a call between a customer and an agent and communicate to the agent without the customer hearing you.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5
• G2: 4.6/5
• TrustRadius: 3.2/5

Pricing (starting price per seat/month)

• Call Tracking: $45.00⁴⁷
• Call tracking + form tracking: $95.00
• Call tracking + conversational intelligence: $95.00
• Call tracking complete: $145.00
• A 14-day free trial is available.

For more information about CallRail and its alternatives please check out our data-driven and transparent article on CallRail alternatives.

5- Aircall

Aircall is another alternative to Talkdesk, with over 100 software integrations and over 15,000 customers worldwide. The software provides both desktop and mobile apps that may accept and route calls from 100+ countries using its IVR/ACD, call recording, and workforce management tools. ⁴⁸

Aircall can also use AI-powered analytics and reporting tools for call and voicemail transcription services, including AI conversation analysis, to provide call summaries, talk-to-listen ratios, and call metrics.

Pros

Automatic call distribution (ACD): Users were able to quickly set up and configure a call center to route/distribute calls to available employees based on availability, skill set, and priority of incidents.⁴⁹

Configuration & ease-of-use: Users claim that  Aircall is quick to load (20 minutes) and offers intuitive interface & controls for troubleshooting audio issues.⁵⁰

Reporting: Users liked the easily accessible contact data and the reports for measuring agent productivity on the intuitive dashboard.⁵¹

Cons

Integrations: Users claim that the integration speed with Hubspot is slow, especially for SMS integration.⁵²

Onboarding: Some users have experienced disappointment with the onboarding procedure and couldn’t have started dialing after five days of waiting.⁵³

Documentation: Users expect to have more improved documentation in Aircall.⁵⁴

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.3/5
• G2: 4.3/5
• TrustRadius: 3.2/5

Pricing (starting price per seat/month)

• Essentials: $40.00 (minimum purchase includes 4 licenses)⁵⁵
• Professional:  $70.00 (minimum purchase includes 4 licenses)
• A 7-day free trial is available.

Compared features of Talkdesk alternatives

1- Low-code no-code development

Our research data reveals that “ease of use” is the most frequently used (11%) positive term for low-code and no-code development platforms, according to customer evaluations.

Low-code and no-code platforms offer pre-built templates and drag-and-drop functionality, allowing users to create applications quickly and without extensive coding knowledge. Thus, using software can become as simple as using daily apps, allowing the average business user to become a citizen developer.

2- Next best action recommendations

~60% of consumers expect businesses to know their unique expectations⁵⁶

Next Best Action (NBA) is a consumer engagement strategy that creates hyper-relevant customer experiences by combining AI and real-time interaction data. Companies can decide the most appropriate and significant action to engage customers by understanding their individual preferences across any channel. 

For example, a customer who has recently purchased a tablet and subsequently encountered advertisements for a charger is a next-best-action recommendation.

3- Advanced analytics

Advanced analytics is an indispensable tool to evaluate contact center data since ~80% of surveyed CX executives believe it is vital to collect business intelligence data from contact center customers. ⁵⁷

With advanced analytics, businesses can pursue a data-centric semi-autonomous or autonomous data (or other content like images) collection/analysis approach to identify deeper insights, make forecasts, or produce recommendations.

4-Deployment

Software deployment is the method of making software accessible for usage on a computer by users and other applications.

Deployment types are listed as follows:

On-premise (desktop): On-premises deployment needs all databases, applications, and infrastructure to be housed and maintained on your company’s premises, requiring your IT personnel to manage the deployment on their own. 

Web-based or cloud: Web-based deployment is the continuous deployment of computer resources and service provisioning over the internet (“the cloud”) rather than employing private servers. For example, Software as a service (or SaaS) is a way of deploying applications over the Internet.

Note: Cloud deployment functions in the same way cloud deployment does, however, cloud implementations do not require continuous internet connection.

5- Number of integrations

Software integration is the technique of integrating one software into another, often via application programming interfaces (APIs). Software with a high number of integrations is important to automate and execute a wide range of operations and improve the overall functioning of your organization. 

What is a contact center?

A contact center is a customer support hub that offers several communication channels such as telephone, email, online chat, SMS, and more.

Contact center solution is a method that can be used by customer service or sales teams, enabling agents to assist consumers, speed up response times, and give tailored interactions and services.

What is a call center?

A call center is an online or on-premises customer support tool that offers phone support. Each call center agent often answers numerous phone calls every day to assist customers with difficulties ranging from basic billing questions to detailed technical concerns (with the option to integrate with CRM software).

Contact center vs. call center

Call center software has a single goal: to provide excellent customer service over the phone. Contact centers use an omni-channel strategy.

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous tech companies, including Salesforce.

Further reading

Please, read our transparent, up-to-date articles to learn more about cloud contact centers.

• Top 7 Contact Center AI Applications: A Holistic Approach
• Top 10 Cloud Contact Center Solutions
• Top 7 Contact Center Software
• Top 10 Tools For Contact Center Automation

Please check our transparent and data-driven software list of our contact center vendors.

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