Google Voice vs. Lifesize CxEngage

[Google Voice is] great if you have a workforce that needs to make calls for business purposes from their personal mobile device, while keeping their personal phone number private. If you have a large company with its own telecom system, it probably won't be necessary if employees already have their own landlines or separate work phones.

Incentivized

Implementation was top notch. Great team to work with. Application and tools are good and very useful. Customer Support is strong as well. Would recommend more details and assistance on some resolutions but over all, quick response and quick resolutions is the norm. Room for improvement for front line associates working from home. And better understanding on how Twilio issues affect CxEngage as some time the status pages don't match the same story

Incentivized

• Google Voice has been great for setting up additional phone lines and numbers.
• The voicemail inbox is a great feature and you can see when messages come in online and listen to the messages from your computer.
• Google Voice allows us to have multiple phone numbers and lines for specific business purposes.

Incentivized

• Great flexibility working with flow creation and editing
• Great support staff
• Good overall package for workforce management and quality monitoring
• Integrates well with our tools.

Incentivized

• It can be tricky to configure exactly how you want it. If you are particular about which voicemail greeting goes to which number, and how it appears when it rings through to the phone - it can take a good amount of work to set it up properly.

Incentivized

• Stronger support and more reliable system for users not on a commercial network
• Consumer friendly and intuitive reporting and dashboard tools. build canned reports
• Reporting: Ability to get a combined SVL for all queues included on a report (now we manually calculate after exporting the report into excel). Same for all major data points (ASA, AHT, etc.)
• Ability to include abandoned calls and an abandonment percentage which excludes short abandons on the Queue summary report. Now the report just shows total abandons and abandonment percentage so if we want to exclude short abandons we have to pull a separate report to find out how many calls abandoned in less than 10 seconds then calculate the "true abandoned number" (calls abandoned minus short abandons)
• Ability to change what is considered a "short abandon" and then report on it. Right now the only option is the built in tracking of calls that abandoned in equal to or less than 10 seconds.
• Ability to "save" an agents "default" skill profile so that any changes we make can be returned to "BAU" with a click of a button
• quicker data/historical report retrieval
• way to separate what we have listed as a queue name for reporting vs. what is used for the queue name in the "whisper" (the issue we had with WT queue naming conventions because we had to have the whisper be super precise)

Incentivized

It's user friendly, how to use it is self explanatory, they support all their own options while someone like Phone Booth uses a third party. I can cancel Google Voice anytime and I choose how much I spend with Google Voice

I haven't had problems with dropped calls, bad reception, lost recordings - everything works the way it should. The iOS app is easy to use, and the process is easy to explain to other people. It's also the cheapest way I've found to call internationally - I've used it to interview people from London and Austraila.

Incentivized

They do not offer support unless you have the Business account for Google Voice under G Suite. This is tough, because Google doesn't really have a customer support team for this service, so when it gets shut down for a few hours, we have no choice but to wait it out. But this doesn't happen that often, which is great.

Incentivized

It is a pretty seamless program to transfer to, even for people who either have little experience with these programs or people who were stuck on Skype

Incentivized

We implemented in 2018 and were only given 8 weeks to do it...as per the direction of our parent company at the time. Serenova at the time responded well and we were able to go Live within 8-weeks...albeit the product overall was a big change and had gaps in features over our previous contact management solution.

Incentivized

Google Voice at the peak of its adoption did serve as a very real and effective solution. However bugs persisted, and innovation lacked, and support for the product soon declined. However, there are several other solutions provided that focus on making one product as best as it could be. Google made it clear to me as a customer, that this was a backup for a backup. When you look at the simplicity on its own, it appears to be fantastic, however as you dive deeper, and experience its lack of smooth edges, you find that it's been built by engineers who were given a scope, rather than solving for a use case and listening to customer feedback. Many of the other solutions available on the market, see this opportunity. This is why voice communication is a growing SaaS vertical, albeit competitive. Understanding the customer here is key, and Google understands what drives value to the larger organization. As a business owner, I understand, that when a business has to allocate resources, another department, or service suffers. Unfortunately this product feels to be the one that has met that fate

Incentivized

It's been too many years...I don't remember. Except in 2021 we looked briefly at Amazon and Salesforce call center offerings. Both were too basic at the time that even if we got a great deal on licensing (we are a Salesforce house for other things), we couldn't easily (or at all) do things like Callbacks and some of the more robust flow buildouts that we have in place today with Lifesize.

Incentivized

• Google Voice has saved us a lot of time in regards to overall productivity.
• Google Voice allows us to operate at a greater scale than without it.
• Google voice allows us to track which advertisements are working best.
• Google Voice allows us to spend less time listening to voicemails.

Incentivized

• lower operational costs
• improved agent productivity
• improved flexibility in design and admin work

Incentivized