Is Orum right for your business, or is Kixie a better choice? If you’re reading this, chances are your business relies on agents making lots of phone calls. With so many sales dialers on the market, how do you choose the optimal solution?
Following the tried and true method of comparing features and reading online reviews can lead you to the best choice. Thankfully, we’ve done the work for you by taking a realistic look at how Orum’s live conversation platform stacks up to Kixie PowerCall.
The Options: Orum and Kixie
Two popular options for contact center phone systems are Orum and Kixie. Read the breakdown below to understand the best option for your sales team and your overall business.
Table of Contents
- Overview
- Things to Consider
- CRM Integration
- Onboarding and Support
- Local Number Options
- Dialing Capabilities
- Price
- Conclusion
Overview of Orum and Kixie
Orum
Orum is a power dialer system that focuses on increasing live conversations and reducing the number of voicemail boxes, IVRs, and hangups that sales development teams face. They offer a cloud-based sales dialer that leverages AI, and reporting capabilities for sales teams and managers.
Orum describes themselves as an AI powered sales tool, working “to accelerate the manual process of calling.” As of November 2022, popular software review platform G2 shows 88 reviews for Orum and an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars.
Kixie
Kixie, an Orum competitor, provides seamless voice and SMS capabilities for sales teams. It combines an enterprise phone service with rock solid, intelligent CRM integrations and a powerful outbound sales dialer.
Kixie offers automations and deep integrations into leading CRMs to ensure that no leads fall through the cracks. As of November 2022, G2 lists over 280 reviews for Kixie, with numerous 5-star reviews and an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars.
Things to Consider When Choosing a Sales Dialer
Outbound call agents drive your business growth. Arming them with great tools to reach as many prospects as possible accelerates that growth. The quality of your sales dialer directly impacts how many calls your agents can make, as well as the quality of the connection on those calls and the likelihood a cold call will result in a conversation.
What good are calls without robust reporting? When assessing dialers, look at the quality of information the system provides. Call agents should have the capacity to track call history, easily transfer calls to sales staff, and not worry about dropped calls. Managers should be able to quickly assess call agents’ performance.
Tightly syncing your calling activity to your existing CRM can boost productivity immensely. You want agents to have all the information they need to successfully complete calls, without system delays. This makes a robust CRM integration incredibly important to your agents’ success.
The dialer should not only give you all the features needed for success, but come with full implementation assistance and amazing customer support.
CRM Integration
Orum CRM Integrations
On their website, Orum states that they offer “seamless integrations with your favorite tools.” However, integrations with Orum’s software are only possible for the following 5 platforms: Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, and Gong. In order to use data from another CRM or application, you’ll have to manually export a contact list as a .csv file and then upload it directly to Orum.
Kixie CRM Integrations
Kixie bi-directionally connects with many popular CRMs, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Zendesk, and many more. Kixie’s HubSpot integration is native, and you can trigger advanced workflows including auto-SMS and auto-call campaigns from the Kixie dialer.
Getting your entire sales team on Kixie and integrated with your CRM takes only a few minutes and a few clicks. Plus, Kixie’s solutions engineering team can build custom bi-directional integrations and workflows on your behalf, free of charge.
Agents do not have to put in extra effort by referring to information in your own databases as well as what’s on Kixie. Agents see a complete profile of the customer, including past contact attempts, voicemails or conversations had with other agents in the Kixie dialer. The platform’s clean look and easy-to-navigate features mean agents can find and act on information quickly. Agents can fully personalize conversations with the prospect on the other end of the line.
What’s more, you can send automated texts and calls with Kixie via Zapier. With our custom, 2-way integrations, you can send an auto-SMS, auto-call, add call to cadence, remove from cadence, and remove from queue. Our solutions engineers are also more than happy to help you set up these advanced integrations at no extra cost.
Existing customers love Kixie’s seamless CRM integrations too. Stephen C. raves in his review on G2, “Kixie has been a game changer for our business! I use the Kixie integration with Pipedrive, and the built-in integration is phenomenal. Then I started playing with the webhooks and zapier automation to really take my business to the next level. If you have a sales team and making calls is how you make money, you need to make sure that you implement Kixie into your business.”
Mary Beth T. writes in her review of the Kixie sales dialer on G2: “I handle sales and account management, so the ability to easily text or call a client from the CRM or the PowerDialer is a game changer. I cannot quantify how much faster I move with this tool, but I’d take a pay cut to keep Kixie if I had to–it’s that important. I believe Kixie will become more important to our company as we grow and more people utilize it.”
Onboarding and Support
Orum Support
While there is limited information about the level of support customers can expect to receive with each Orum calling plan, there is a help center and a getting started guide on their website. However, there is no description of the type of support (ie, phone, chat, email, ticket, etc.), offered. A handful of verified customers who wrote Orum reviews note that customer support is helpful, responsive, and professional.
Kixie Support
Kixie offers full Zoom, chat and email support, meaning you can get in touch with a Customer Success Manager quickly during your business hours. We provide unlimited, free solutions engineering and chat/email support for all of our customers, and our whole team is based in the US. Customers write overwhelmingly positive reviews of their Kixie support experiences.
Chris C. writes in his Capterra review, “At first it was like anything else, something new and I didn’t know much about it or how to use it. Customer service is awesome and always there to lend their help.”
Matt K. explains in his G2 review, “The ease use and ability to connect to HubSpot was our primary consideration when looking for a calling platform. We didn’t realize there were such great features packed inside Kixie when we signed up. Great product and service. Kixie support is always quick to get back to us when we have an issue. Their chat support is killer!”
Local Number Options
Orum Local Number Options
As a sales rep, it’s important to continuously find ways to improve your ability to connect, engage, and ultimately close deals with customers. One pivotal tool that sales teams rely on for increasing phone call connections is local presence dialing. Local presence dialing is a powerful sales engagement feature that enables you to call from a different area code – one that’s local to your prospect’s phone number.
Many sales dialer software platforms offer a form of local number dialing, including Orum. They offer 10 phone numbers per month in any area code you’d like, which you can rotate each month. To gain access to an additional 15 numbers per area code, there is an up-charge of $1900 per user.
You must manually toggle between your local presence numbers. Additionally, they offer a spam number reduction tool called “Reputation Alerts” that notify the sales person of how likely it is their number will show up as “Scam Likely” on outbound phone calls.
Kixie Local Number Options
On the other hand, Kixie offers local number dialing, also known as Automatic Local Presence Dialing. Data shows calling agents connect at a significantly higher rate when calling with a local number – that is, a phone number that is local in relation to their prospects.
Kixie’s local presence automatically rotates between a pool of 10 numbers for each area code in the US, matching that of the prospect you are trying to reach. Plus, Kixie automatically identifies and replaces phone numbers that are likely to be flagged as spam by cell carriers – it’s a completely hands-off process powered by AI.
Jake B. writes on G2 in his “Kixie is Awesome – Incredibly Reliable Service with Amazing Features!” review, “Kixie offers some fantastic features. We save hundreds of dollars each month with their unlimited minutes plan. And the success of our campaigns saw an 8% bump in connection rates when we enabled local presence to always show a local area code when placing outbound calls.”
Thomas C. writes in his Capterra review, “Kixie has the easiest and most cost effective local presence that I’ve found in my last month or two of research. Essentially just turn it on and start dialing. In the short time we’ve been using the trial we’ve already been happy with the improvements to our connection rates.”
Dialing & Call Capabilities
Orum Dialer & Call Capabilities
For companies looking for a sales dialer, Orum offers clients a couple different options: a power dialer and an auto dialer. Their power dialer option dials only 1 number at a time, while Orum’s auto dialer (also known as a parallel dialer) can call up to 10 numbers simultaneously.
With Orum, sales teams also have the ability to leave pre-recorded voicemails, also known as voicemail drops, if a rep meets a voicemail inbox greeting. This process is fully automated and not dependent on choosing a call disposition, nor does it require an agent to choose a voicemail to drop.
Additionally, Orum does not offer inbound calling features such as IVRs, call queues, or call routing.
Kixie Dialer & Call Capabilities
Click-to-call, voicemail drop, PowerCall dialing, call recording, calling monitoring, call whispering, and call barging all come out of the box with Kixie. What’s more, you can also opt into multi-line PowerDialing with Kixie, and call up to 10 lines at a time. Giving your telesales reps the ability to click-to-call, drop voicemails automatically, and power dial off of your CRM can make your reps extremely efficient.
Kixie was recently named the #1 Auto Dialer software by Forbes Advisor, described by their review team as the “Best Top-Rated All-In-One Contact Center Solution”.
Managers can use the call recording, call whispering, and call barging functionality to coach and train the sales team. Kixie offers a full suite of reporting aimed at driving sales team performance, including a call reporting and analytics dashboard, and a sales leaderboard.
For teams that field inbound calls as well as place outbound ones, Kixie is a great solution. Kixie offers ring groups, inbound call queues, intelligent inbound call routing, IVRs, and more to help facilitate inbound calls.
Happye D. notes on their Capterra review, “Kixie allows me to track my calls; view call history; dispose of my calls in order to understand how each call was used; I can easily view, and download each call for Quality Control purposes; I can easily call contacts by using the click to call…without having to manually dial, and organize contacts.”
Overall, Kixie offers very similar functionality to Orum at a lower cost. Plus, pairing Kixie with CallBlitz (a free virtual sales floor tool) allows teams of all sizes and budgets to collaborate remotely and dial together.
Price
Orum Pricing
Now for the serious question: how much does Orum cost? Orum keeps their pricing confidential, requiring prospective customers to setup a demo with a sales rep before pricing is revealed. Based on our research, the cost of Orum’s power dialer is $450/month per rep. Their parallel dialer is priced at $1,200/ month, per rep.
Kixie Pricing
Kixie gives customers simple, easy-to-understand pricing. Plus, you can mix and match pricing tiers to fit the needs of each of your agents. For example, if you have an office manager who only needs access to a business phone and not sales related calling tools, the Integrated Plan would be best for them, and the Professional Plan would be ideal for the rest of your sales team. Please see the pricing page for full details.
More important than price is the value a sales dialer provides. John S. reflects in his G2 review, “Click to call, voice mail drop, SMS templates, CRM integrations, easy to use phone app and real time tracking with dashboards have all made the productivity and management easier and more enjoyable for each team member. All in all with the pricing and the value you get this has been little risk for big rewards.”
Conclusion
It’s no secret that organizations invest a substantial amount of money into a sales dialer system. When that organization relies on its contact center as the primary way to find and nurture leads, every detail is essential.
From the technical aspects of running smoothly to the quality of information provided through the platform, it’s worth your while to closely analyze the respective benefits of any sales dialer.
Orum and Kixie target slightly different markets, with Orum focusing on enterprise sales teams that need an outbound power dialer.
As an Orum alternative, Kixie offers calling, SMS, and time saving solutions for SMB and mid-market sales teams and contact centers that prioritize a high volume of inbound and/or outbound phone calls.
Kixie’s platform offers reliability, speed, and efficiency with its 10-line dialer and smart automations. Its seamless connection with leading CRMs ensures call reps spend their time calling prospects vs. entering data. Finally, customers rave about Kixie’s support and overall positive impact on their sales teams.
Set up a 1-on-1 demo with an experienced Kixie team member here. Or, try Kixie completely free for 7 days (no credit card required to sign up) and see for yourself if it can benefit your sales team.
