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Abandoned Call: the caller hangs up before reaching an agent and before any dialogue can begin. It is also called Lost Call.
Abandonment Rate: The opposite of the success rate, represents the amount of callers who hang up before an agent answers the phone or before making a choice on an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
ACD: based on pre-set distribution criteria, the system intelligently sends a call to the most appropriate agent, based on the caller’s demands. Automatic call distributor (ACD) is a telephony software system that answers incoming calls and sends them to the appropriate agent or department inside a business. Based on pre-set distribution criteria, the system intelligently sends a call to the most appropriate agent based on the caller’s demands.
Adherence: also known as compliance, assesses a Brand Specialist’s ability to stick to his or her timetable. Also used to assess a Brand Specialist’s ability to follow a script, message, policy, practice, or method exactly as it was taught to them.
Agent: also known as a CSR (Customer Service Representative), it’s the person who answers inbound and outbound calls in a call center.
Agent Availability: is sometimes expressed as a percentage, is a measure of how much time Brand Specialists are available to take inbound calls.
Agent Occupancy: the percentage of time a Brand Specialist spends actively engaged in conversation time or after-call work as opposed to idle (waiting for a call). The total handle time divided by the reporting period is used to compute agent occupancy.
Agent Status: the availability, on-call, off-phone work, or other designation of a Brand Specialist.
Agent Dynamic Scripting Designer: dynamic agent scripting is an effective way to ensure that your customers’ needs are being met each time they speak to an agent on the phone. This scripting software allows your agents to respond to customers appropriately, and prepares the agents for each customer interaction.
Agent reports: gives agents the possibility to see their personal call log and team data.
ANI: Automatic Number Identification is often transmitted via tonal frequencies conveyed over the phone line and referred to as a CallerID. A function of the telephone network that sends the caller’s phone number to the call center in real time. Long-distance carriers provide ANI.
API: Application Programming Interface consists of a collection of procedures, protocols, and instruments for interacting with software.
ASR: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a technology that automates some or all elements of a call allowing contact centers to use natural language with little agent participation.
Auto Dialer: once a call has been answered, an auto dialer can connect a customer to a live agent or may give important information via an automated message. It is an outbound call center solution automatically calls phone numbers.
Automatic callback: when a consumer encounters a busy situation or an agent is not available, the system allows to contact them back when an agent becomes available.
Agent Status: the current status of an agent, such as whether they are available, on call, working off the phone, or another label.
AI (Artificial Intelligence): A computer’s capacity to simulate human cognitive qualities such as learning and comprehension.
Analytics (Contact Center Analytics): Using a variety of approaches to collect consumer data across all platforms in order to boost customer happiness, improve customer engagement and detect customer requirements. The visual display of data-driven insights is usually applied in this context.
Announcement: callers are given a pre-recorded command. brand advertising may include a re-interactive voice response, for example.
Answer Rate: the amount of calls answered by an agent, compared to the numbers of calls offered.
Answering Machine Detection: AMD (Answering Machine Detection) allows you to figure out who is on the other end of an outgoing call and adjust your call flow accordingly. You can use AMD to see if an outbound phone call was answered by a human, an answering machine, or a fax machine. The caller is linked to the agent once AMD has executed and made its decision.
Answer Supervision: When the automated call distributor (ACD) gives the signal to the local or long-distance carrier or another device to accept a call and begin apply long-distance costs.
Application-Based Routing and Reporting: when compared to the traditional approach of routing and tracking transactions by trunk group and agents, the automated call distributor (ACD) may route and track transactions by the type of application or call.
Apps: mobile device software programs that allow users to execute specific tasks. Customers may download apps from brands and e-commerce for different services or purchases.
Architecture : a system’s essential structure. This specifies how all of the system’s components function together and how they are interconnected.
Automated Attendant: a telephone answering system that provides callers with a recorded menu of options for routing their call to the intended recipient.
Automatic Dialer (Auto Dialer): a telephone system that dials outbound calls from a list and directs answered calls to agents.
Average Handle Time (AHT) : the average length of an encounter, including wait time, conversation time, and after-call work, is measured by AHT, a critical performance metric.
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Business to business (B2B): B2B refers to business-to-business operations.
Business to consumer (B2C): Business-to-consumer (B2C) operations are those that occur between companies and customers.
Business Process Outsourcing: a process of outsourcing some corporate processes to third-party service providers or contractors In basic terms, it simply means selecting an outsourced call center staff rather than supplying call center operators.
Busy Hour Call Attempts (BHCA): The number of phone calls made during the busiest hour of the day. It is used to assess the capacity of telecommunications networks.
Blended Agent: when an agent manages both inbound, outbound calls, and applications.
Blended Call Center: when a call center manages a mix of inbound and outbound calls, webchat, emails, SMS and social media.
Blocked Call: when a call cannot be completed due to a busy circumstance.
Brick and Mortar: the actual structure or facility, the physical premises of a corporation, where a company conducts business.
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Call Center: physical location that provide inbound, outbound, and limited self-service consumer, combining human and technological resources.
Call Blending: the process of allocating the inbound/outbound flow of emails, calls, webchat or any other interactions to a group of agents.
Caller ID: information about a caller on the phone or a separate screen. This helps the person on the receiving end to determine who is attempting to contact them. It’s crucial to think about corporate branding while making outbound calls.
Carrier: a company that provides telecommunications circuits or transports data between two sites. Both domestic and international providers might be included.
CCaaS: Contact Center as a Service refers to cloud-based software solutions used by call center personnel to give a better overall customer experience. The infrastructure is hosted in the cloud rather than on your own servers. A CCaaS solution’s principal goal is to appropriately route calls and maintain track of your customer interactions.
Channels: communication channels include phone, email, chat, and social media.
Compliance: in a call center, the act of meeting governmental or government standards and rules. Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards, for example, demand that financial transactions and credit card information be protected.
CPaaS: is a cloud-based communication solution with an API enabling simple integration with any current app.
It includes audio and video chat, monitoring, and other bespoke capabilities that you can integrate into any customer-facing application to let your workers respond to queries and issues from consumers in real time.
Customer Experience (CX): the totality of a consumer’s views and feelings as a result of interactions with a brand’s products and services is referred to as customer experience (CX).
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): a call center technology solution that provides employees with access to account information and history in an effort to provide a real-time, personalized customer experience across all channels including voice, web and social.
Customer Experience Management (CEM): a company’s procedures for tracking interactions between customers and contact center agents.
Call Recording: It is a technology that enables call centers to capture and record all customer and agent telephony interactions. The caller has to be informed before the call is being recorded. Call recording is also used to capture an offer, action or transaction performed by any part of the conversation.
Contact Center: Usually synonymous with call center. A contact center will handle email, chat, social media, SMS and faxes – not just calls. The International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) defines a contact center as a coordinated system of people, processes, technologies and strategies that provides access to information, resources and expertise, through appropriate channels of communication, enabling interactions that create value for the customer and organization.
CTI – Computer Telephony Integration: CTI or Computer Telephony Integration is a technology that was developed in response to the need for companies to connect their telecommunications networks with their computers. CTI incorporates voice, dial, video, or voice-over-IP phone technologies that establish new and better ways to communicate.
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Dashboard: a data presentation display that offers a summary of important performance measures and statistics compiled with the goal of discovering insights.
Dialed Number Identification Service: enables the IVR to provide distinct menu options and route calls to different groups of agents, ensuring that callers are sent to the most appropriate staff. It’s a service provided by contact centers that informs business clients of the number called for each incoming call.
Do Not Call List (DNC): a national register of phone numbers that telemarketers or any entity that produces automated or live calls that are not designated an emergency may not contact. Individuals can opt out of getting these calls.
Document Management System (DMS): There are many call centers that handle large amounts of incoming emails that can’t be checked manually. As a result, DMS opens and scans it for electronic dissemination.
Direct to Consumer (D2C): Describes the business relationship of selling directly to the consumer without an intermediary.
Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS): This helps a call center manage multiple programs or companies and identify how to answer the phone for a specific program or client. It assists in determining what number was phoned by a caller, therefore it performs like a caller ID.
Dynamic Business Routing (DBR): handles the routing, management of call queues, and distribution to agents, giving far greater capability. This enables phone conversations and other multichannel interactions, such as e-mail, Twitter messages, back-office chores and scanned documents, faxes, audio / video recordings, and so on, to be routed.
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Employee engagement: The extent to which employees are actively engaged in their work and supporting their customers. It has the potential to be a significant driver of retention, motivation, performance, CX and company success.
Expected Wait Time (EWT): In a call center, EWT is the expected time that customers are told to wait before they can speak to an agent. It is one of the best practices to measure the average expected time.
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Federal Communications Commission (FCC): This federal agency oversees interstate communications.
Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA): Nationally, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act safeguards the privacy of student education records. It allows parents and students over the age of 18 specific rights over their children’s or their own educational records.
First Call Resolution (FCR): Properly diagnosing and resolving the customer’s issues on the initial point of contact. This customer relationship metric illustrates the quality of service customers are receiving by measuring how often their issues are resolved on the first point of contact. Typically supported with a CRM or Case Management application.
Flowchart: A step by step diagram of a process.
Full-Time Equivalent: the number of staff you need to hire, to create a team, which can drive performance on the expected level. Specifically, one FTE equals full-time employee’s hours. It may consist of a few part-time employees, whose work altogether gives a full-time tenure.
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Gateway: A server in telecommunications that links two networks that utilize distinct transmission methods.
Grade of Service: a metric used to calculate the probability of call being delayed or even blocked, expressed as a percentage. It can be calculated by dividing the number of banned calls by the number of available calls.
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Handle Time: the time an agent spends taking a call, doing after-call work, handling any necessary and extraneous details, and the time it takes for the technology to process the work. It may also refer to the amount of time it takes a computer to complete a transaction.
Help Desk: A call center that is set up to address questions about product installation, usage, or issues. The word is most commonly associated with computer software and hardware support centers. Most commonly used to describe a computer software or hardware supplier’s customer support operation.
HIPAA Compliance: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, is a set of regulations that govern the authorized use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI). The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulates HIPAA compliance, which is enforced by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
Hit Rate: The proportion of successes gained as a percentage of total efforts for an activity.
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Interactive voice response (IVR): A system that collects and stores data from touch-tone phone answers. Customers are asked to pick the service they want by pressing the keys on their telephone keypad. Following that, the IVR directs the call to the most relevant agent.
Inbound: Incoming calls, emails, chats, social media or SMS inquiries that are initiated by customers and prospects.
ISDN: Integrated Services Digital Network: a telecommunications protocol, which describes a standard for digital telephony, concerning transmitting voice and data over traditional phone lines. It allows multiple devices to use the same phone line, which is necessary for the call centers.
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Local Area Network (LAN): links technical equipment varying in size from big to small, such as one network user or thousands of users inside an organisation; devices include servers, desktop PCs, and more, so that they may share information, programs, and peripherals.
Lost Call: known also as Abandoned Call.
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Multichannel: a marketing approach in which many independent channels, such as brick-and-mortar, catalog, or online, are used to contact a customer.
Multichannel cloud call center: A multi-channel cloud call center is a customer experience platform that integrates multiple touchpoints—including voice, text, social media and the web—making customer interactions accessible via an Internet server.
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Net Promoter Score: NPS is a leading growth indicator based on a survey that asks consumers on a scale of 0 to 10 how likely they are to suggest a brand to friends and colleagues. The respondents are classified into three groups: promoters, who score 9-10 and are loyal enthusiasts; passives, who score 7-8 and are pleased but unenthusiastic; and detractors, who score 0-6 and are dissatisfied consumers who can harm the company’s reputation. and growth with negativity. The score might vary between -100 and 100, is calculated by subtracting the percentage of promoters from the percentage of critics.
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Omnichannel: an extension of the multichannel strategy that emphasizes the synergies across all channels for a better shopping and customer service experience whether the consumer is buying online from a personal computer or mobile device, via phone, or in a store.
Omnichannel cloud call center: An omnichannel cloud call center is a multi-channel contact center that uses contemporary cloud-based infrastructure and services to provide seamless client experiences across all touchpoints. In a cloud-based contact center, the firm does not own, host, or operate any of the equipment that the call center runs on; rather, the call center infrastructure is hosted by a third-party service provider.
Open Ticket: an unfinished client contact that is awaiting completion.
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PCI Compliance: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a collection of security guidelines meant to guarantee that the businesses who handle, accept or store credit card information operate in a secure environment.
Power Dialer : When calls are placed one after the other in rapid succession, a power dialer is used. If the number is busy or disconnected, or if no answer is received, the next number is dialed without any wait or input from the agent.
Progressive Dialer: As soon as an agent is available, the Progressive dialer dials the number and pulls a clients’ file on the workstation at the same time. This means that your agent has only a few seconds to read it before the conversation starts. This technology offers a very useful option to maximize the agents’ useful time with answering machine detection. It is an automated dialing approach in which the contact’s information is displayed to the contact center representative prior to dialing the number.
Predictive Dialer: When a live client or prospect responds, the call is routed to an agent, predictive dialer is the tool used to automate the process of making these outgoing calls. When the dialer detects busy signals, answering machines, or ring no response, the number is returned to the queue.
Preview Dialer :When your system detects that one of your agents is available, it presents him with a form containing all the information contained in external databases (CRM or other).
The agent will then read the file in front of his screen, get an overview of the customer’s situation and will be able to get a first idea of what to expect from that specific call. Thus, when he is ready he will be able to trigger the call by clicking on a button on his interface.
Private branch exchange (PBX): A private branch exchange (PBX) is a telephone network that is used within a corporation, where users can communicate both internally (inside the organization) and externally (within the firm) using various communication channels such as VoIP, ISDN, or analog.
PBX/ACD: A private branch exchange with automated call distribution capability.
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Queue: A form of directory number that is used to retain calls or messages that are awaiting to be answered. It may also refer to a line or list of objects in a system that are awaiting processing
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Real-Time Alerts: instant notification of important measurements utilized to offer insight into the business.
Real-time data (RTD): Frequently used in navigation and tracking, real-time data instantly delivers collected information with no lag in the information timeliness.
Retrial: A caller who “retries” after receiving a busy signal.
Ring No Answer: the period of time that a customer care person is unable to make calls or is not available, resulting in unanswered calls
ROI: Return on Investment (ROI) is a financial statistic used to assess the performance and profitability of investments that are planned or have already been made.
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SaaS: Software as a service (SaaS) is a software distribution program refers to a cloud provider which hosts programs and makes them available to end users through the internet.
Seasonality: variation in business volume from one time period to the next, changes that are frequently foreseeable based on prior experience and are determined by the structure of an organization.
SOC 2 Compliance: establishes client data management standards based on five “trust service principles”: availability, security, processing integrity, confidentiality, privacy.
Softphone: A softphone is software that allows users to make phone calls via the Internet using their smartphone or tablet. It performs all of the tasks of a switchboard and is often provided by a service provider.
Skill-Based Routing: a method for routing a call straight to the most competent agent in the call center in order to give the best customer care for the specific issue
Speech Recognition: a speech processing system’s capacity to interpret spoken words and sentences.
Supervisor: the individual who is generally in charge of managing a group of agents on a first-name basis Supervisors are typically outfitted with specific telephones and computer terminals that allow them to monitor agent operations.
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TCPA Compliance: Telemarketing calls, autodialed calls, prerecorded calls, text messages, and unwanted faxes are all governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The TCPA also established the national do-not-call registry, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has the authority to adopt rules and regulations implementing the TCPA.
Text to Speech: a type of assistive technology that uses API to transform text into a more or less natural-sounding spoken voice output.
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Ucaas: UCaaS is an acronym that stands for “Unified Communications on Demand.” It is a unified communications solution, or all-in-one solution, that integrates a cloud phone system with collaboration, messaging, and video conferencing technologies into a single system. Businesses may utilize UCaaS to streamline operations, enhance flexibility and cooperation, increase user support, and lower communication costs. This Cloud-based solution is accessible from a supplier who handles all technical and infrastructural concerns.
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Voice of customer (VOC) – A metric used to characterize the whole process of gathering a customer’s expectations, preferences, and aversions.
Voice Response Unit (VRU): it is a type of interactive technology that allows humans to connect with computers using voice or dual-tone multifrequency.
VOIP: Voice over IP (VoIP) is a software that turns your voice into a digital signal, allowing you to make a call from your computer, a VoIP phone, or any data-driven device. Using an internet-connected computer, a headset, and VoIP, you may make phone calls from anywhere, at any time.
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WebRTC Softphone: WebRTC allows you to add real-time communication features to your application that runs on an open standard. It allows for the transmission of audio, video and general data between peers, allowing developers to create sophisticated voice and video communication systems.
Wrap-Up Time: comprises the time by agents conducting after-call work. Meetings and breaks are not included.
Work From Anywhere: agents may be connected in minutes using a cloud-based platform that just requires an internet connection. Deployments are made the same day, and onboarding is simple. Allow your contact center agents to check in from anywhere, at any time.