Call centers suck. There’s no arguing this. People hate having to call in for customer service and support, nobody likes phone trees or hold times, and it’s just not the most efficient medium these days. Unfortunately, the call center is so engrained in our society, globally, that there’s no chance of getting rid of this system in the near future. We can only hope that it just organically converts, gradually, to other mediums and gives way to better solutions. Fortunately, that seems to be where it’s heading, and virtual call center software is a sign of that.

While this doesn’t eliminate a lot of the downsides to call centers, like the possible need for menus, hold times and other unpleasant nonsense, it does improve the ability to manage these systems, improve call quality, and track logistics better, to reduce the problems significantly if not eliminate them.

There are a lot of these solutions out there, so you have your pick if you want to keep up with technology and go virtual with this, your oldest service channel. But, not all of these are created equally of course. What’re the best ones? Well, below are three particularly impressive ones, and I’m sure one of these will work well for you.

#1 – simplyCT

SimplyCT is a big one, and it exemplifies the standards for this new hybridization of call center and digital communications channels. It’s a little pricey, but when you see the extensive features, you’ll probably not mind the price tag.

Among its features are dynamic IVR flow, auto dialers, ACD, campaign management, CTI, call list imports, toll fee number provisioning, call monitoring, ANI, call recording, Salesforce integration, real time reporting, business processes, live monitoring of agent status, skill based routing, idle time based routing, chat support, and much more.

This one’s a big one.

#2 – 8×8 Virtual Contact Center

This one’s a little slimmer, and may be better for small or medium businesses as a result. This isn’t to say 8×8 isn’t good, but it’s based around a little more than just call center methodology (and this can be a very good thing, frankly).

Its features include skill-based routing, call recording and logging, multimedia management, web callback, realtime monitoring, historical reporting, crm integration, CTI, collaboration and decent IVR.

This one’s more budget friendly, and may work best for small businesses. It can grow with companies, though, so don’t worry about starting out with this one.

#3 – PBX

And finally, for those who want the absolute basic solution, you have PBX. This one’s very basic and simple, but it works very well.

Its simple feature base offers customized greetings, multiple extension numbers, voicemail on all extensions, and being entirely SaaS, it requires no special equipment or installations locally. This one offers one month free, so you’re out nothing trying it.

However, you may outgrow this one quickly unless you’re willing to embrace multi channel support heavily, to offload some of the incoming contacts.

So, there are various tiers of complexity and quality for virtual call center software, and it all depends on what you need and how multi-channel you plan to be. Regardless, there’s definitely a solution out there for you.