19 October 2026 · 3 min read
Running a remote calling team: headsets, internet and devices
A browser dialer means an agent can work from anywhere with a laptop and a connection. Whether the calls sound good comes down to a few unglamorous choices. Here they are.
Remote calling teams are normal now, and a browser dialer makes them easy to start: an agent signs in from a laptop at home and calls from the same numbers as the office. What is not automatic is call quality. The person on the other end does not hear your software. They hear the agent's microphone, room and connection.
Headsets: the one piece of hardware worth paying for
Use a wired USB headset with a noise-cancelling boom microphone. Laptop microphones pick up the whole room, and the other person hears it.
Avoid Bluetooth earbuds for full shifts. They drop out, switch between devices, and their microphones are built for convenience rather than clarity.
Buy the same model for everyone. When something goes wrong you are troubleshooting one device, not twenty.
Keep a couple of spares. A broken headset at 9am should not cost an agent the day.
Internet: steady beats fast
A voice call needs very little bandwidth, roughly 100 kilobits per second in each direction, which almost any connection can provide. What it needs is consistency. Delay, jitter (variation in delay) and lost packets are what make a call sound robotic or cut out, and they come from congestion, weak wifi and shared connections rather than from a slow plan.
Plug in with an ethernet cable wherever possible. If wifi is the only option, sit close to the router.
Keep large downloads, video streaming and cloud backups off the same connection during shifts.
On a speed test that reports them, aim for latency under about 150 milliseconds and jitter under about 30.
Where power cuts are common, put the router on a small UPS. A laptop has a battery; a router usually does not.
The room
A quiet room with soft furnishings sounds better than a bare one, and a closed door beats any noise cancellation. If an agent shares a space, a headset with a good boom microphone matters even more.
Devices and sign-in
On ReachCalls, one agent seat can be signed in on two devices, for example an office desktop and a home laptop. That covers the agent who works some days in the office and some at home without anyone sharing a login. Sharing a login between two people is a bad idea anyway: you lose track of who made which call.
Test before the first shift
Run the microphone and speaker test on the agent's own machine, with the headset they will actually use.
Make a test call to a mobile you are holding, and listen for delay and clipped first words.
Check the connection at the busiest time of day, not the quietest.
Make sure the agent knows who to message when something sounds wrong. On ReachCalls, agents can chat with their admin from the panel.
Our onboarding guide covers the rest of the first day, and the desk phone piece explains why a browser is now a perfectly good place for a phone call.
