vicidial.org

Hello,

I'm looking to setup a small call center operation doing mostly (90%+) outbound calls to mostly the US and Canada (perhaps international later). We would start with around 10 people and possibly get as high at 50. (I don't see it growing much beyond that)

I was thinking of using Vicidial after my research kept suggesting it was the best for what I want to do. Then some IT guys who I met with to help setup
the equipment and servers etc strongly suggested we look at 3CX as an alternative. They use it in their IT support call center and thought it was easier to use etc etc.

I'm wondering if they might be overlooking any benefits of Vicidial (other than saving the license fee) for a high volume outbound operation like ours being that they are probably doing small volume of inbound calls for their IT support service.

Any help to choose between Vicidial and 3CX much appreciated. Here is the link to their website : https://www.3cx.com




Best,

3CX is proprietary and closed-source, and is a lot less flexible than VICIdial, with a lot less features. With 3CX you will be restricted to what 3CX allows you to do, and if they ever stop supporting the product or service level you are using, you will have to move to another of their products to keep all of your data. If you are worried at all about vendor lock-in, you don't want to go with a proprietary solution like 3CX.

mflorell wrote:3CX is proprietary and closed-source, and is a lot less flexible than VICIdial, with a lot less features. With 3CX you will be restricted to what 3CX allows you to do, and if they ever stop supporting the product or service level you are using, you will have to move to another of their products to keep all of your data. If you are worried at all about vendor lock-in, you don't want to go with a proprietary solution like 3CX.

Great thanks, that's a good point.

One thing I was told by someone who had operated an outbound call center before was that being able to customize the amount of call drops you are allowed would be very important to efficiency and having agents not sitting idle. Maybe Vicidial would allow us more customization of features like this?


Best,

You can set the target drop percentage in the Campaign Detail screen if you are using one of the ADAPT_ dial levels.

I'm wondering if they might be overlooking any benefits of Vicidial (other than saving the license fee) for a high volume outbound operation like ours being that they are probably doing small volume of inbound calls for their IT support service.

Precisely. FreePBX (Free, Open Source) and other solutions (like 3CX, proprietary and licensed/closed source, the other end of the scale) are for inbound and manual dials only. They are for those who "just need phones to work". They have modules for things like VoiceMail, call menus, and FindMe/FollowMe forwarding. NOT usable by an outbound autodial call center at all.

For Autodial you have very few software choices. And when you reduce those options to:
* Free (NO "per seat/month/person" fees)
* Open Source
* Autodial
* Tested/Functional/Actively Supported

All that's left, really, is Vicidial. There are some companies out there that will let you "use their dialers" (ie: They have Vicidial running in the background, you use it without seeing it, you pay them to keep it functional). But those companies will charge you per seat, per person, per month, and/or per minute. In the end ... you'll end up paying a minimum of 2 cents per minute (likely closer to 3 or 4 cents per minute). They will try to obfuscate this by charging for *ANYTHING* except minutes, but in the end that's what THEY pay! They pay by the minute for every call you make. They pay under 1 cent per minute. They charge you (in the end) 2 cents per minute or more. Proof ... profit for them, convenience for you. But if that adds up to more than a small amount of money, plus the other restrictions they are likely to impose, just get your own Vicidial server (Vicibox.com is a great place to start) or lease one (Vicihost.com or where I work, in my signature).

If you have an IT department/staff/person who can manage the dialer in-house, and you have enough bandwidth (5Mx5M is a good minimum, if it can be dedicated to "dialer"), then build one. You can also lease "for a while" and then purchase when you are comfortable. There are also lots of Vicidial Professionals that can walk you through the process. Best practice: Build a fake server in a virtual machine (not good for production, just Proof of Concept for a single agent to understand the process) using the .iso CD installer at Vicibox.com. There's a PDF on the site to get you through installation. After installation, switch to the Vicidial Manager's Manual available on EFLO.net. Start at page one and don't skip anything and you'll have a fully function Vicidial server usable by a single agent to test your scripts and see how everything works. And you'll have a nice sandbox server to play with after you build the real Vicidial server in a nice quad core dedicated PC to run your room. No it does not need to be a "server" in a "rack" ... but 2.3Ghz+ and 4 cores (not 4 threads, 4 cores) with 2G RAM is a good minimum server.