Weighing Your Phoning Options? 6 Reasons smrtPhone is the Best Cloud-Based Phone System

You’ve probably heard of CallRail – afterall, they spend millions on marketing – but do you know what they do? You may be surprised to find out that CallRail’s primary purpose isn’t helping you make calls. CallRail bills itself as offering tracking and analytics for phone calls, meaning it’s more a piece of marketing software than a phone system. Unlike CallRail, smrtPhone has always been a full-featured, cloud-based phone system, focused on deep CRM integration with tracking and analytics built in. If you’re considering a new phone system – whether looking to switch or get your first – we want you to be sure you know what to look for (and what vendors actually provide!). Let’s compare CallRail and smrtPhone!

1. True CRM Integration

Since its inception, smrtPhone was built to integrate deeply with CRMs. Whether or not our customers work within a CRM at the start of their business, we know that at some point, they will grow to need one. We wanted smrtPhone to be ready for that integration whether it occurs on day 1 or day 500. But what does deep integration actually mean?

When everything is synced – from your leads in your CRM to your inbound and outbound calls to every text you’ve sent or read – then the story of each client is clear and accessible. Every action you need to take is already teed up, and no lead will get left behind. All of your calls made by smrtPhone are seamlessly tracked to client profiles within your CRM. Notes, dispositions, next steps and history of communication sits in one place. 

• Click-to-Call and Click-to-text directly from CRM 
• Inbound and Outbound Calling from the same number that your client is used to seeing
• Client information situated in one place to make calling efficient and informed: Lead info, communication history, agent, notes and call recordings, just to name a few.

With CallRail, the integration of your calls within your CRM has to be done by grabbing results from a CallRail email, or via a third-party app, Zapier, that requires additional cost without the robust functionality of a phone system that was intended to integrate with a CRM. For example – you can have a notification of a call pushed to your CRM, but calling in and out of a CRM isn’t possible. Your CRM is where your client’s information lives, and your phone system shouldn’t be an afterthought or exist off to the side. 

Right now smrtPhone integrates with Podio, InvestorFuse, Salesforce, and several others are coming within the year. With each CRM we add, we stick to our promise that it’s done intentionally and with full integration rather than with slapdash or 3rd-party solutions. 

2. Phoning

When it comes to phoning, CallRail and smrtPhone are almost apples to oranges in comparison. Why? Because, like we mentioned earlier, CallRail is more marketing and analytics software than it is phoning software. Though they now offer phoning via their Lead Center, its scope is limited and more of an add-on to their tracking capabilities than a standalone product. smrtPhone has always been about making and sending calls and texts. It’s what we started out doing, and it is still what we’re best at. The fact of the matter is, we can do everything CallRail can do – but they can’t do everything we do. 

With CallRail, you can only make calls to people who’ve called you first, or sign up for their Lead Center for an additional monthly fee to make outbound calls to new numbers. Then, when you make those calls, you’ll be asked to “Please press 1 to connect to the phone number” and they’ll forward the call. This wastes time, and relies on a third party connection that can only add potential issues, besides just creating a bad user experience for your agents. 

With smrtPhone, any outbound call you make – whether they’ve called you first or not – can quickly be made from your Mobile App, Web App or from inside your CRM. Whichever number you want to show up on the recipient’s Caller ID can be chosen. It’s fast, it’s seamless, it’s simply what we do best. 

Most importantly, we feel that your outbound calls often need to be linked to your inbound, which is the missing puzzle piece of Callrail’s tracking and analytics software – they’ll forward calls to you via a tracked phone number, but what next? With smrtPhone, you can call out on the same number, seamlessly. 

3. Pricing Structure 

Pricing should be easy to understand. Unfortunately, CallRail is pretty confusing to understand – they have multiple products and multiple packages, based on number of users, minutes, and what functionality you think you’ll need. 

Even phone systems that offer unlimited plans can have monthly usage charges, because ‘unlimited’ can still quietly include a cap. smrtPhone has made pricing as transparent as possible, and has tied it to what you actually use, so that you never pay for extra, unused time. We can’t necessarily say the same for CallRail.

Here’s an example: 

Let’s say you need 4 tracking phone numbers, for 4 Users, who use 8,000 minutes per month and send 3,000 texts. With CallRail you’d pay $45 for the most basic subscription, then $390 for the 7,800 minutes (you get 200 free) and $46 for the texts. These are for local minutes, and this is only for call tracking! This doesn’t include outbound calls which need to be done through another add-on product called Lead Center. 

With smrtPhone, you’d pay $42/month, $160 per month for 8,000 minutes, $34 per month for 3,000 text messages and $20 per month for the phone numbers. 

The totals? CallRail is $481 per month in this scenario, while smrtPhone is $256.

Keep in mind that the CallRail subscription is also limited in terms of phoning options – you can’t use those phone numbers to cold call out. Your subscription is for number tracking, which is hyper-focused on inbound marketing, and little else. 

smrtPhone allows you to pay for what you actually use, at a rate that’s competitive, in a method that’s transparent. What more could you ask for, at the end of the day?

4. Power Dialing

This comparison is easy: smrtPhone offers a power dialer and CallRail doesn’t. With smrtPhone, you can choose to purchase our smrtDialer, and opt for either a single-line or a multi-line sales dialer. Our multi-line dialer allows for agents to dial up to four people at once, ideal for lead lists where your answer rate might skew lower, and you want to increase the chances of a connection. In phone-based business, more calls means more deals!

Outbound calling is also a massive part of sales, and it’s invaluable to have your dialer be connected to your CRM seamlessly. With smrtPhone, your outbound numbers can even match the inbound numbers you’ve placed on ads. Think about the consistency and trust that builds with potential and established clients. 

Here are just a couple of reasons our customers love smrtDialer:

• Unlimited Campaigns, Unlimited Leads
• DNC & Compliance Tools Built In 
• Custom Call Dispositions 
• Calls and Notes auto-logged into CRM 
• Custom Call Scripts and Data Fields 
• A.I. Voice Detection

5. Analytics 

smrtPhone offers the same analytics that Callrail does, but we also offer more: KPIs linked to agents, call times, and calling hours just to name a few. Of course we can help you determine what marketing campaigns and digital ads are yielding you the most quality calls, but we can also help you discover which of your agents are closing deals or having trouble connecting, or what times of day yield the most answers. Your phone system is giving you so much information – not just about marketing, but also about employee success, ideal demographics, and overall strategy. Harness the power of the calls you’re already making! 

Callrail is all about tracking – but they only track one thing! Don’t waste the data on the calls you’re already making.

6. Support

We’ve talked a lot about phones – how they integrate with your CRM, how to make seamless outbound calls, how you and your employees can power dial to generate revenue – but what happens if you have an issue? Any software company worth their salt will tell you that even with a stellar product, things can go wrong. Whether it’s a user issue, a carrier hiccup or even something that smrtPhone needs to fix, we want our clients to get fast, human service. It’s the backbone of what makes our company great, and what we’re proudest of. If you chat with smrtPhone during business hours, you will always talk to a human being. We promise to address your concerns with a personal touch, no robot copy-and-paste responses that try to approximate what you’re asking. We also always offer the following: 

• Assistance with backend setup
• Troubleshooting Sessions
• Client Demos 
• VA Training 
• 30 Day Free Trial while you figure out if smrtPhone is the right fit for you (double the length of CallRail’s Trial) 
• Easy-to-use, friendly interface with step-by-step user guides expected to launch within the year

And if there’s a feature you want? Our roadmap is FULL of requests from clients. Custom solutions and additions to our products are often born from unique situations that our customers present to us. Signing up with smrtPhone isn’t just about saving money and ensuring you have a phone system that works (though those are great reasons!) it’s also about ensuring a strategic phoning partner that responds to you personally. CallRail’s support unfortunately can’t match that – which you can find out for yourself, or skip the guesswork and sign up today with smrtPhone. 

Even though smrtPhone and CallRail have some similarities, they’re really two different offerings, and we hope we’ve helped you understand some of the key differences. smrtPhone is a phone system that offers tracking built-in, while CallRail is a tracking software that allows for some types of calls. Head to smrtPhone.io to chat with a live support person today if you want to ask any more questions, or set up a demo! We’d love to hear from you, Happy Phoning!