What is a Central Office?
A central office is a telecommunications facility into which all local residential and business phone lines converge and are connected to switches that enable phone service. They are also called telephone exchanges and switching centers and are telecom's version of an electrical substation.
"Office" is a bit of a misnomer and a throwback to when central offices were populated with dozens of switchboard operators who would connect callers to their destination numbers. Now, with automatic call connections, central offices are filled with racks of hardware and tens of thousands of cables. Employees are mostly engineers.
Central offices are designed for maximum uptime, which means they're disaster resistant. The phone lines that go into central offices have been buried underground for decades to mitigate the negative effects of snow, ice and wind. Now, many central offices are also being built underground not only to protect them from disasters but also to protect the surrounding area from the electromagnetic radiation they emit.
Due to the importance of quality voice services, central offices are an important component of the contact center ecosystem.
How NICE can help
Like central offices, we place high importance on uptime and disaster mitigation.
NICE is the market leader in providing customers the cloud contact center software they need to deliver consistently exceptional customer experiences. Benefits include:
- Modern ACD providing digital first omnichannel routing and increased business agility
- Integrated and comprehensive workforce management solutions to engage and empower contact center agents to achieve business goals
- Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to enhance the customer experience and automate routine agent tasks
- Omnichannel customer journey management
CXone provides an intelligent, unified suite of applications covering the breadth of contact center management disciplines, simplifying administration and streamlining the user experience.