The Top 5 Unified Communication Providers Right Now

Millions of people worldwide work remotely at least some of the time. Within two years, over 70 percent of U.S. workers will use a combination of desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets to work across devices.

It’s no secret that the workplace has changed drastically alongside technology and because of the global pandemic.

Driving productivity with the right business communication tools requires flexible, mobile, and unified technology. These factors have driven the rapid growth of Unified-Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS), or hosted cloud communications tools for businesses. 

By bringing all of your multimedia communications tools into a single platform, companies achieve new efficiency and transparency across business locations and industries.

UCaaS integrates all of your apps into a single, easy-to-use portal, including email, presence, video conferencing, text messages, file-sharing, and more. This all-in-one portal for client and coworker communications is cloud-based and accessible from any device.

The 5 Best Unified Communications Providers Right Now

NOTE: these providers are not in any ranked order, but merely listed with detailed information about their solutions to help you identify which providers to evaluate in more detail.

RingCentral

Overview:

RingCentral is a popular choice for unified communications. They offer three solutions: RingEx (formerly RingCentral MVP), offering messaging, video, and phone integration; RingCentral Contact Center, offering customer support and engagement solutions; and RingCentral Video, offering unlimited video meetings to your team. RingCentral also offers add-on tools for webinars and standing meeting rooms. 

Notable Features (RingEx)

• Custom workflow builder and automation options to streamline operations.
• Built-in AI offers personalized analytics and insights for better decision-making.
• Available add-ons for digital events with RingCentral Rooms and RingCentral Webinar.
• SMS texting feature offering another avenue for customer communications.
• 300+ pre-built integrations available for SalesForce, Zendesk, MailChimp, Microsoft Teams, HubSpot, and more.

Pricing (RingEx for 6-100 users paid annually)

• Core - $20/user per month
• Plus - $25/user per month
• Ultra - $35/user per month

Customer Review Scores

• Gartner: 4.3 stars out of 5
• TrustRadius: 4.2 stars out of 5

Positive Reviews

• "I love how comprehensive Ring Central is - the multiple applications make it a great solution for our company."
• "RingCentral was very easy to setup for our local office as well as remote employees. We mainly went with RingCentral for this functionality. I could order and ship a phone to a remote employee or set up a phone number for remote employee without them needing a phone and all they would have to do is plug in the phone or log in to RingCentral to get going. Call routing and everything else was seamless to the remote employees."

Negative Reviews

• "Product works poorly, I have had to uninstall/re-install at least a dozen times in the five months I have been with the company."
• "It was good to start, but as of late the service has gotten worst and the product has gotten worse. A phone system that is buggy, drops on customers and is not built for any serious company with real customers. Beware of Dodgy Contract: This is a company that has an auto-renew yearly contract with month to month payments and when service and support go out the windows and the phone system doesn't work, you are still locked into a contract."

Dialpad

Overview:

Dialpad offers solutions for business communications and customer engagement. In addition to the tools listed in this post, Dialpad integrates artificial intelligence (Ai) tools into its sales outreach and customer self-service offerings. Dialpad offers four different packages, business communications, meetings only, customer contact center, and sales dialer for outbound-only calling.

Notable Features

• Ai Contact Center: an omnichannel customer service platform that incorporates messaging, web and social tools; Ai chatbots; and Ai CSAT, a feature that determines the CSAT score from every customer interaction based on sentiment analysis.
• Ai Sales Intelligence: Ai-enabled sales outreach suite that includes coaching tools, playbooks, and scorecards all powered by built-in Ai.
• Dozens of built-in integrations for CRMs, workflow automation, data visualization, security & compliance and more.

Pricing (Business Communciations, their UCaaS platform; billed annually)

• Standard - $15/user per month
• Pro - $25/user per month
• Enterprise - requires a sales call

Customer Review Scores

• Software Advice: 4.2 stars out of 5
• TrustPilot: 4.4 stars out of 5

Positive Reviews

• "Love the mobile app and the ability to make and receive calls over cellular and WiFi. We've been using it for years and it's been rock solid."
• "Top notch customer service! They're always very helpful when in need. I use Hangouts to contact them and never have an issue. We were using a competitor before and it would take days to get a reply so I'm very content with how they're handling issues.

Negative Reviews

• "It starts to get a little pricey the more employees you have. The 'Fees' attached to the price are outrageous! 
• "Onboarding has been an absolute disaster. Manager and salesman telling us one thing….then onboarding specialist telling us something totally different. Although the onboarding specialist has been helpful, she is rarely available. It’s been two weeks and still glitches that has cost us leads. Total nightmare."

Vonage

Overview:

Vonage unified communications focuses on integrating communications related to the customer experience. You can utilize Vonage for communication APIs like messaging, voice, and video, unified communications that enable collaboration across channels, and contact centers, empowering sales and service agents to take control of customer-facing communication. Vonage focuses on businesses in industries like healthcare, education, finance, and retail. 

Notable Features

• Business Inbox: Use SMS, MMS and Facebook Messenger to communicate and collaborate in customers preferred channel.
• Virtual Receptionist: Fully customizable and dependable call routing technology for holidays, lunchtimes, emergencies and after-hours.
• Powerful SD-WAN solutions let you prioritize calling to ensure Quality of Service and support bandwidth-intensive apps like video conferencing.

Pricing (billed annually)

• Mobile - 1-4 employees, $13.99/mo per extension; 5-19 employees, $12.59/mo per extension, 20-99 employees, $10.49/mo per extension, 100+ employees, contact sales
• Premium - 1-4 employees, $20.99/mo per extension; 5-19 employees, $19.59/mo per extension, 20-99 employees, $17.49/mo per extension, 100+ employees, contact sales
• Advanced - 1-4 employees, $27.99/mo per extension; 5-19 employees, $26.59/mo per extension, 20-99 employees, $24.49/mo per extension, 100+ employees, contact sales

Customer Review Scores

• TrustRadius: 8 stars out of 10
• GetVoIP: 3.8 out of 5 stars

Positive Reviews

• "I used Vonage Business Communications for over 5 years as a solution to replacing an aged PBX system. It turned out to be a great solution for us, bringing the church into the 21st century with a high tech solution using existing architecture, easy expandability, advanced tools like auditing and visual voicemail, and a lot more."
• "We have Vonage Business Cloud deployed in two of our offices, for remote users, and are looking to add it to our HQ soon. We found our old provider very constricting in what they allowed us to do. We also used Vonage to replace on-prem systems. Moving to Vonage has allowed us to support our remote user base a lot easier than anything else we have used in the past."

Negative Reviews

• "We use Vonage for our phone, text, and faxing service. We use Vonage with the hope of receiving and placing phone calls. However, our lines are down more than 50% of the time. [I believe] This is a terrible product with no easy way to reach customer service. They do not take phone calls, the only communication is through chat. It takes 60 minutes to reach someone and they usually close the chat without a resolution."
• "Vonage Business turned out to be a big mistake for my company. Two months into service I began to learn details that were not disclosed during the onboarding process. The SMS feature I signed up for in September 2023 was never implemented. Just recently I began having issues that prevent me from being able to log into the desktop app only to find that it was of a system-wide outage."

8x8

Overview:

8x8 is a cloud communications platform that links your business phone, video, chat, and contact center solutions. 8x8 integrates with CRM applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Freshdesk. You can choose between plans for all-in-one communications, and all-in-one communications plus a contact center solution. 

Notable Features

• The Intelligent Customer Assistant is an AI-driven tool designed to empower your customers with self-service options.
• 8 x 8 Engage, a customer engagement platform that leverages AI, native data, and third-party data to give customer-facing as much context as possible. 
• 8 X 8 Frontdesk, a suite of tools for reception including advanced call handling, shared directory and presence, and one-click away-from-desk call diverting.

Pricing

• X2 - not listed on their website, must contact sales
• X4 - not listed on their website, must contact sales
• X6 - not listed on their website, must contact sales
• X7 - not listed on their website, must contact sales
• X8 - not listed on their website, must contact sales

Customer Review Scores

• TrustPilot: 2.0 out of 5 stars
• GetVoIP: 4.3 out of 5 stars

Positive Reviews

• "The process from beginning to end has been effortless. Customer Support has been helpful, correcting issues within hours. Once our telephone numbers ported everything worked a dream. Calls using the app are great, although can be affected by telephone signal or wifi speeds, that said it is another simple piece of software!"
• "8x8 is great! As a customer service representative taking 100's of calls from all over the world, our company relies on 8x8 to support our customers and it's always easy taking, making, and receiving calls every day. The application runs smoothly and is simple."

Negative Reviews

• "I signed up with 8x8 hoping for a smooth, professional communication service for my business, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Just one day after signing up, my account was inexplicably frozen without any warning or clear reason. To make matters worse, when I contacted their support team, they couldn't even tell me when or if the verification process would be completed! This has left my entire team in limbo, unable to work and causing significant disruption to our operations."
• "The actual service is stable and uptime is good. That is where the good ends. 8x8 ownership is only focused on profit and will nickel & dime you for every feature that should be included, get ready to pay for a user license just to hot desk a phone. The admin scheduling is terrible, no recurring events, you can't set users passwords as and admin. The call analytics are useless. The support is scripted and takes forever to get to a competent agent, calling in will have you waiting forever.

Atlantech Online

Overview:

Atlantech offers solutions for voice, fiber, and data. You can customize your solution with Atlantech to fit your business's exact needs and use-cases. In addition to all five tools listed above, some features available through Atlantech's UCaaS services include desktop and file sharing and seamless CRM integration. Atlantech also offers amazing customer support, featuring a US-based team available 365 days a year.

Notable Features

• Calling Features: Unified communications with VoIP, video, & chat, unlimited calling & texting nationwide, cloud fax, auto-attendant, ACD groups, voicemail transcription.
• Mobility: Mobile app for Android & iOS to take business calls anywhere; text, message, conference call from mobile device.
• Cloud PBX reduces costs, ensure uptime, and ease the burden on your technical team.
• SIP trunking capabilities extend a softphone to PBX users ithout incurring the cost of changing their existing infrastructure.

Pricing

• Business Line - starting at $12/mo per user
• Premium Line - starting at $18/mo per user

Customer Review Scores

• TrustPilot: 4.5 stars out of 5

Positive Reviews

• "Always a pleasure dealing with support when needed. Very reasonable costs for services provided and convenient location!"
• "I have been using Atlantech for several years and have been extremely satisfied with their service. Honestly, the best Internet service provider I have ever used. I really like the fact that I can call them directly and a well-trained knowledgeable support person promptly answers the phone."
• "The tech that worked with me went above and beyond his duties. Not only did he help me resolve the issue, but he also stayed on the phone while I tested out the fix, and even used his own personal phone to do a test call with me."

Negative Reviews (the most negative on TrustPilot)

• "Very happy with our decision to rollout Teams Phone and Cloudfax with Atlantech as our partner. There were a few bumps along the way, as with any rollout. But as always, the Atlantech Online team was very responsive, agile, and quick to act."
  
• "We recently ported to Atlantech within the last few months. The WSSC team has found Atlantech to be very responsive and helpful whenever we have questions or want to discuss any concerns that we have."

5 Unified Communication Tools to Adopt in 2022

1. Voice

Thirty-two percent of today’s customers surveyed recently described the phone as the “most frustrating” channel for customer service. If you read between the lines, the vast majority (68 percent) still prefer the phone to other customer service methods like email, chat, or social media. Like it or not, voice messaging may not be the only way your employees or customers communicate in 2022, but it’s still likely the predominant business communications tool.

Voice as a UCaaS feature can significantly reduce the costs of your business voice calls, especially if your organization has a lot of long-distance or international calls to make. Today’s cloud PBX tools offer rich, high-quality voice features like trunking, messaging, conference calling, call queuing, and interactive voice recognition (IVR).

These cost savings can mount further for businesses with many inbound calls with UCaaS features for contact center environments. With integration with customer service apps and smarter call routing, real companies have shaved up to 10 seconds off their average call handling time. 

If your call volume fluctuates seasonally, requiring you to scale your contact center lines up or down, these changes can be made instantaneously with minimal cost.

Benefits of Voice

• Reduce the cost of business voice calls
• Offer rich, high-quality voice features
• Employ IVR and call queuing
• Scale your contact center lines instantaneously
  
  

2. Mobility First

Fifty percent of today's professionals use smartphones or other mobile devices as their primary work "computer." We're officially at a mobile tipping point. Today's best UCaaS solutions don't just offer mobility as a feature. They offer mobile-first capabilities that support full business communications from mobile.

Leading UCaaS mobility solutions enable workers to continue responding to messages while participating in a voice or video call without switching apps. They also offer "deep integration," or the ability to plug-and-play with your existing business apps, like Excel and Salesforce.

The workforce is also increasingly adopting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) solutions for some employees. UCaaS can make secure work from an employee's device possible by creating boundaries between personal calls, texts, and work communications. This includes using both the personal and work phone number from the same device while keeping corporate data under wraps.

Benefits of Mobility First

• Enable workers to respond in-app to messages while participating in a voice or video call
• “Deep integration” abilities for business apps like Excel and Salesforce
• Offer security features on an employee’s device so they can work from their personal device safely

3. Unified Messaging

Unified messaging is a UCaas feature that provides employees with easy, unified access to all their messages across channels from a single portal. This eliminates the possibility of missing information that can easily occur when you’re checking email, voicemail, chat messages, project management software comments, and more from separate platforms or apps.

Better yet, leading UCaaS platforms like our own atlantech|softphone are designed for the needs of today’s mobile workers, who can't always listen to the audio of a voicemail message. From any device, they can click to access voice, video, fax, and email from a single inbox that resembles popular messaging apps. Voice messages are even transcribed for easy review in meetings.

Yesterday’s cubicles and desk phones aren’t a part of how many of us work today. Instead, today’s workers may share open office space, collaborate with global teams, or maintain communications with coworkers while they’re traveling for work. Unified Messaging makes it easy to do everything you need, from click to return a client’s call or participate in group messages with a project team, from a single app.

Benefits of Unified Messaging

• Offer employees access to all of their messages across channels, from a single portal
• Transcribe voice messages for easy review
• Collaborate with global teams easily from a single application
• Eliminate the possibility of missed information between communication channels

4.  Conferencing

UCaaS and other web conferencing technologies have significantly extended the idea of business meetings to include global teams. The total market for business conference solutions is expected to grow from $4.6 billion in 2021 to almost $10 billion by 2028. Today’s workers would much rather dial into a meeting than attend in person, especially given that researchers estimate people are 13 percent more productive at home than at the office.

Unified Communications supports your employees’ need to participate in conferences on-the-fly, and even switch between audio and multimedia communication modes like screen sharing or video chat. You can invite coworkers to join the call when you're already on the line in real-time. It’s just as easy to collaborate on a second’s notice with UCaaS conferencing as it is to stop by a coworker’s desk in the office.

Read more about how UCaaS can support collaboration at multi-location businesses in Unified Communication and Collaboration Tools: Make the Cloud Work For You.

Benefits of Conferencing

• Enable employees to participate in conferences on the fly
• Allows easy switching between audio and multimedia communication modes like screen-sharing
• Enables employees to easily invite colleagues to join an in-progress call

5. Video Chat

Eighty-two percent of workers admit they’re less likely to multi-task (and more likely to pay attention) on a video call. Eighty-nine percent think video chat makes it easier to get group projects done efficiently, while 90 percent think it’s easier to get their point across.

Video chat can offer serious advantages over voice calls for certain contexts, like collaboration and negotiation. It's easier to capture non-verbal communication through video and more natural to feel a connection when talking face-to-face. Adopting UCaaS video conferencing features could drastically reduce the amount of business travel needed and improve productivity.

UCaaS video chat can also transform the way you think about video, even if you're already using standalone apps for this purpose. Since video is transmitted as HD audio and unlimited calling is generally included, you may reduce the costs significantly. Integrations with document management and calendar apps make it easy to share information and schedule video talks.

Benefits of Video Chat

• Easily collaborate with colleagues in disparate locations
• Connect with colleagues, customers, and vendors by speaking face-to-face
• Reduce business travel costs
• Increase worker productivity

Optimizing Your Efficiency with Unified Communication Tools

Some of the most beneficial UCaaS features are remarkably unsurprising. Chances are, your company is already using communication technologies like audio conferencing and mobile apps. 

The difference between the standalone apps you're already using to chat and message and the leading UCaaS options is that Unified Communications is designed for today’s mobile-first workplace. It’s easy with UCaaS to work, collaborate and communicate productively from any device or anywhere.

While UCaaS features can drive productivity and collaboration for your company, they’re not the only angle to think about. It’s important to evaluate vendors on experience, platform, customer satisfaction, value, and more. 

To learn more, instantly download the free eBook: 10 Questions To Ask Before You Buy Unified Communications as a Service.