Cloud contact center
Manage contact center teams across offices, regions, and time zones from one platform, with Dialpad AI Agents resolving routine requests and Dialpad AI coaching human conversations in real time.
What is a cloud contact center?
A cloud-based contact center is software that stores data in the cloud and allows for customer communications over the Internet rather than relying on-premises hardware.
Previously known as "call centers," contact centers often handle not only phone calls but also digital interactions with customers. Cloud contact center solutions are often referred to as Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS.
What are the benefits of using a cloud-based contact center (vs. on-premises)?
The benefits of using cloud-based contact center solutions as compared to on-premises, especially for companies with remote or distributed employee setups, include:
lower upfront costs (that come with switching over to a cloud-based subscription model)
better scalability
easy installation
more advanced functionality (e.g., AI-powered features, built-in video conferencing, analytics)
Power an agentic contact center with Dialpad AI Agents
Not every customer conversation needs a human agent. Dialpad AI Agents, available on the same platform as Dialpad's cloud contact center solution, can handle routine voice and digital requests on their own, drawing on your knowledge base and connected systems to answer questions, schedule appointments, and complete tasks.
When a request needs a person, the AI Agent hands off to your team with full context, so customers don't have to repeat themselves and agents can focus on the conversations that need them most. Together, they make it possible to bring agentic AI into your contact center, where automation and human agents work from the same data instead of separate systems.
Provide a better customer experience with Dialpad Support for contact centers:
Massive scalability
Dialpad Support for contact centers is easy to implement and scale. We'll help you port your existing numbers over during setup. Contact center management is done from your online dashboard: you can add or remove contact center agents, manage locations and phone numbers, and more. This makes it straightforward to stand up or scale contact centers across multiple offices, regions, or brands from a single admin dashboard, with consistent tools and reporting everywhere your team works. Setting up a new contact center can take as little as a few minutes thanks to Dialpad's cloud-native platform and menu-driven self-configuration, and you can add or remove call queues and users on your own as your needs change.
Tools for super-supervisors
You can't personally monitor every customer interaction at once, but you can help your agents provide an excellent customer experience using Dialpad's AI tools. Sentiment detection shows you which calls may need your help, then you can view the real-time transcript or listen to the call to see if you need to jump in (then you can whisper to the agent or barge the call, if needed). AI Recaps give you summaries and action items, and AI Scorecards grade customer interactions according to your guidelines.
Real-time training—at scale
Dialpad AI can also automatically pop up AI Live Coach Cards when certain keywords are spoken on a call. Competitor names? Pricing questions? Refund requests? Supervisors can create cards for all of these topics and more to give agents talking points and important details. It’s basically an on-demand coaching feature alongside Dialpad's AI Coaching Hub.
Speedier QA
Accelerate quality assurance (QA) reviews, reduce compliance risks, and improve agent adherence with Dialpad's AI Scorecards. Instead of supervisors having to review call recordings manually, Dialpad AI automatically suggests when QA Scorecard criteria have been met and highlights coaching opportunities.
Live guidance for outbound teams
With Dialpad's AI Playbooks, coaches and supervisors can track rep adherence to sales methodologies like BANT, SPICED, and SPIN more easily. Dialpad AI can automatically suggest questions and phrases that they need to say during a call (for example, asking about budget or purchase timelines), understand whether the behavior was met, and check the task off the list (or notify managers if this isn't being done) for outbound contact center teams.
Integrations with tools you already use
Dialpad Support integrates with popular customer experience tools and CRMs like Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more to automatically log customer data and provide an embedded dialer for making calls without leaving those tools. Or, build your own custom automations with APIs and webhooks.
Workforce management
Dialpad WFM lets teams forecast demand, build schedules, and track schedule adherence alongside contact center analytics. Connecting workforce management with real-time dashboards and historical trends helps teams align staffing, agent performance, and customer experience more effectively.
Any device, anywhere
One big cost-saving opportunity, if you’re open to contact center agents using their own devices, is allowing them to BYOD (“bring your own device”). Dialpad works across iOS, Android, PC, and Mac—and also works in web browsers—so supervisors and agents can work flexibly on their own devices.
Global voice network and call quality
Many contact center providers layer their software on top of a telephony provider, which can mean additional handoffs and more potential points of failure. Dialpad's telephony and contact center software run on the same cloud-based platform, so contact centers benefit directly from Dialpad's global voice network and dual-cloud architecture.
Call routing
With Dialpad's AI-powered IVR (interactive voice response) feature, you can help your customers self-service and connect themselves to the right person or department quickly—just by setting intuitive routing rules for your IVR. Take that manual call routing work off your agents’ hands (and give them more time to focus on improving customer satisfaction). For agentic contact centers, routing and resolution can also be handled using AI agents. As Dialpad's Chief Customer Officer David Sudbey says:
Traditional contact centers are optimized for speed and containment. An agentic contact center is optimized for resolution.
Call analytics and reporting
Dialpad's platform incorporates a full suite of analytics, providing CX leaders with powerful tools to transform raw call data into strategic insights. Reporting features and filters are built with contact center needs in mind, delivering deep visibility into both agent performance and the customer journey, helping you manage operations with precision. Key features include a queue health report, granular call abandonment insights, and a callback effectiveness report. Supervisors can also track Service Level, which defaults to measuring the percentage of calls answered within 60 seconds, and the Agent:Caller ratio, a real-time view of staffing capacity against current queue volume, both configurable to match your team's targets.
Contact center cost efficiencies
Beyond the lower initial price tag, the total cost of ownership is also lower with cloud-based contact center solutions compared to traditional contact center technology. From hardware costs to setup and installation fees, to regular product updates, running a contact center is typically much more budget-friendly with a cloud option. Cloud solutions also have predictable, fixed pricing models and monthly or annual subscription fees. Dialpad Support plans are published with straightforward per-user pricing, and standard support is included on every plan.
Explore Dialpad's cloud contact center solution
See how Dialpad unifies the contact center, human and AI agents, and telephony on one AI-native platform.
Cloud contact center FAQs
A cloud contact center handles customer conversations, across phone calls, chat, and other digital channels, using infrastructure hosted in the cloud instead of on-premises hardware. Calls are carried over the internet using VoIP technology, while call routing, recording, and reporting all run through the provider's cloud infrastructure. On Dialpad's platform, that same infrastructure also connects Dialpad AI Agents and human agents, so conversations can be automated, monitored, or handed off without switching platforms.
CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service, a cloud-based pricing model where businesses subscribe to contact center software on a recurring basis rather than paying for on-premises hardware and licenses upfront. Instead of a large capital investment, a CCaaS model typically means a predictable per-user fee that scales up or down as the size of the contact center changes.
A cloud contact center evaluation should cover a few key areas: AI agents that can resolve routine requests on their own, omnichannel support across the digital channels your customers use, integrations with the CRM and productivity tools your team already relies on, and analytics that show how both human agents and AI agents are performing. For example, if your team already works out of Microsoft 365 or Salesforce, you'll want a platform that connects to those tools directly rather than requiring a workaround.
Cloud-based contact centers can improve the customer experience in two key ways: by resolving some interactions automatically, and by giving human agents what they need to handle the rest well. AI voice and digital agents can answer routine questions or complete simple tasks on their own, so customers get an answer immediately instead of waiting in a queue. For the conversations that do need a person, agents who can access customer history, call recaps, and coaching guidance in real time can resolve issues faster and hit SLAs more consistently, which in turn tends to drive higher CSAT scores.
Cloud contact centers help make workforce management easier at scale. Supervisors can coach and train agents virtually, using tools like live sentiment analysis and AI-generated scorecards to spot coaching opportunities as they happen rather than after the fact, so performance standards stay consistent across teams, offices, and time zones. This also makes it easier to stand up new teams quickly if a location changes or an unexpected event disrupts normal operations, since agents just need a device and a login to get to work.
When you create a Contact Center, the specific configuration you set up on Dialpad's platform for a team handling calls or digital conversations, you choose a routing type, either Voice (calls, texts, and call recording) or Digital (messaging, web chat, and social channels), and this choice can't be changed later, though you can duplicate a Contact Center if you need a similar setup with a different configuration. Each Contact Center supports up to 30 local or toll-free numbers. Agents need either a Dialpad Support or Dialpad Sell license: Dialpad Support agents get an extension only and place calls through the Contact Center's number, while Dialpad Sell agents get a direct number and additional features like Voicemail Drop and Coaching Teams.
U.S. call recording consent laws vary by state: 38 states plus DC require only one-party consent, while 11 states require all parties to be informed before a call is recorded. Dialpad lets you configure recording settings and exception lists to help you stay compliant across jurisdictions. If your contact center handles payment card data or protected health information, you'll also want to consider PCI and PHI requirements when configuring recording and retention settings.