What type of call center equipment do you need?

Part of running a successful communications center is knowing how to equip it: the requirements you have to satisfy for security and compliance and the flexibility and functionality you need to deliver for agents, clients and prospects alike. Here, we'll review the key essentials for call center equipment.

Essentials for call center equipment

No matter what your business model or specific industry vertical, there are certain essential ingredients that have to be part of any professional solution for call center equipment and software. They fall into a few fundamental categories.

Basic functionality

This one might seem obvious, but there are certain basic functions that your call center phone equipment needs to fulfill. It needs to provide:

  • Extension-to-extension calls
  • Phone paging
  • An auto attendant and hold music
  • Conference calls
  • Call queuing

These are the core elements that ensure your phone system is making it easy and fast for you to connect with colleagues and for customers to enjoy convenience and positive CX when contacting you.

Advanced features for better CX and reporting

At a slightly more advanced level, if you want to go beyond the basics, you'll need access to these features:

  • Cloud-based "call parking"
  • Stored recordings of calls and meetings
  • Automated call routing to match inbound calls with the best available agents
  • Preview and predictive dialing for outbound calls
  • Interactive voice response (IVR) to give customers voice-activated menus to find what they need
  • Video conferencing tools for managing everything from 1:1 conversations to town hall meetings

Such "advanced" features might have seemed optional five years ago. They're becoming more and more essential for meeting the expectations of the modern consumer as years pass and the digital economy advances.

These are all tools focused on giving you personalized and face-to-face tools for interacting with your customers, enjoying flexible call flows, supporting self-service for customers and prospects and maximizing the efficiency of your workforce through better training and reporting.

Security, privacy and compliance

The security and privacy commitments that back up your equipment matter. Quality standards are just as critical, and there are plenty of industry standards, regulations and agreements to keep pace with.

Fortunately, you can rely on 8x8's call center equipment solutions to be compliant with U.S., U.K. and E.U. privacy and security laws and nine separate industry best-practices standards. It's an invaluable degree of peace of mind when you're modernizing your contact infrastructure.

Universality and scalability

If your contact center is using a patchwork of call center equipment and software, getting everything to work together consistently and collating your reporting data can become a challenge. Not to mention that scaling up your operations can become an exercise in confusion about which equipment standard to use.

This is why 8x8 works on the model of unified communications as a service (UCaaS). UCaaS makes it possible to scale your operations seamlessly to meet demand while avoiding unnecessary confusion and duplication of labor. Your people train, work and grow with equipment designed to a single, high-quality standard.

Contact us to update your call center equipment

Get help from the trusted name in business communications to bring your contact center fully into the 21st century. Contact us today to learn more about the solutions 8x8 can deliver for your company.