You might want to start a call center outsourcing agency, or thinking about setting up a call center system for your startup. In day-to-day business conversations, especially customer service, you hear a lot of jargon and abbreviations and wonder what does this even mean?
Every industry has its both business and technical jargon, expressions, and abbreviations using them will make it easy to express complicated topics in small words and enable members to communicate effectively and quickly.
In the call center and telecommunication industry, whether you’re a call center agent, a business owner looking to set a call center system for your business, or a regular customer, you might be probably already familiar with some of these terms. Here’s a list of 30 most common and mostly used in a call center.
Most Common 30 Terminologies Used in Call Center
Abandoned Call
Also known as Lost Calls, it’s when the user hangs up before reaching a call center agent.
Agent
The call center representative that makes calls and answers customer queries. They are also known as customer service representative.
ACD
Automatic or Advanced Call Distributor, also known as call routing, this is the backbone of any call center telephony system and one of the most common terminologies used in contact centers. It means routing incoming calls to the proper queue and the most appropriate available agent based on pre-defined strategies, including time-based routing, and choice-based Routing with IVR.
IVR
Interactive Voice Response, a very common terminology in the call center world. It’s a phone system feature that enables you to have some interactions with the caller without having to go through a human operator.
A common use case for IVR is to keep customers up-to-date with the latest offers and share the company’s latest news and updates.
CRM
Customer relationship management, is a call center technology which allow call center agents to have a context about the customer who’s calling, like his/her interaction history with the company, and issues they had in the past, so they can offer the personalized experience.
KPI
Key Performance Indicators are methods and metrics used to measure performance levels of your employees and call agents. For example, in call center, it could be the percentage of successful calls against total calls.
PBX
IP PBX or PBX, both are used exchangeable, it means Private Branch Exchange. PBX is the hardware component that makes it possible for you to have a fully-featured call center system. It handles all call center functionalities like call routing, IVR, call forwarding. Browse different selection of Yeastar PBX system.
UC
Unified Communications Is the integration of all your real-time communication services.
VoIP
Voice over IP, it’s a technology that allows to deliver telephony services over the internet. VoIP is considered the most important call center technology. It made it cheaper to make calls internally or externally.
VoIP is a large set of technologies and has many useful applications; Call Center, IP Paging, Call Control System, and PBX.
VPN
Virtual Private Network, it means creating a private virtual network over a public network and grand access to certain users to access a company or an organization resource. VPN adds extra layers of security to businesses and organizations.
Modn has all the tools and technologies to set you a mission-critical VPN system in order for you to share files and information safely.
WAN
A wide Area Network is a network that expands a large geographical area for the primary purpose of computer networking.
VLAN
A virtual Local Area Network is a subnetwork which can group together collections of devices on separate physical local area networks.
SIP
Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) is a signalling protocol for IP-based telephony applications. It supports voice calls, video conferencing, instant messaging, and media distribution.
FCR
First Call Resolution, is a way to measure call success. For example, if the caller’s issues resolved at the first time, so they don’t need to call again.
AHT
Average Handling Time, It is the total time an agent takes to handle a caller. It includes time spent on the call with the customer, hold time, and after work. The formula for calculating average handling time is AHT = Total time of all calls (including hold time and after-work) / Total # of handled calls
IP Phone
A phone connected to an Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi and uses Internet to send and receive voice data. It’s used interchangeably with the term “extension”.
There are many features that can make your life easy and convenient, browse different IP Phones models from Fanvil.
BLF
Busy Lamp Field, a light on the IP Phone, or a colored indicator on the Softphone beside the name of the agent. It tells whether another extension connected to the same PBX is busy or not.
ACW
After Call Work, or often referred to as “Wrap Time”, is the time taken by an agent to complete or work for a client after the call has ended.
CLI
Calling Line Identity, used to match the caller’s number with past record of his/her interactions and call record.
CED
Caller-Entered Digits, refers to the digits the user entered on their keypad or phone.
CSAT
Customer Satisfaction Score, a metric used to measure caller satisfaction with the support they get
CDR
Call Detail Record, it refers to the ACD feature that collects data of every transaction (e.g., call duration, agent, time, etc.).
ATT
Average Talk Time, it refers to the average amount of time that an agent spends talking to a customer.
EWT
Expected Waiting Time, it’s the time a caller is supposed to wait before talking to an agent.
ASA
Average Speed of Answer, the term is used to refer to the average of time taken to answer a cal.
ASR
Automatic Speed recognition, it refers to a phone solution that allows the caller to interact with the system by speaking rather than dialing for menu choices.
ICR
Intelligent Call Router call center technology that places inbound calls into a sorting queue and then routes each call to the appropriate agent or agent group.
DSL
Digital Subscriber Line, it’s a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines.
LDQ
Longest Delay in Queue refers to the longest time a caller waited before speaking with an agent.
AUX (Auxiliary Time)
Auxiliary Time is the time the agent remains unveiled to answer a call.
ISP
Internet Service Provider, it refers to the company that provides access to the Internet services.
PSTN
Public-Switched Telephone Network, this is the most ancient term or old in terms of its technology, and it refers to the old circuit-switched telephone network used for the last century.
If you are thinking of setting up a call center system for your company, learn about what you will get and how it will help you to improve customer satisfaction.
You may also be interested in Why You Should Consider a Cloud Solution for Your Shipping Call Center? and DrayTek Provides You with Everything You Need to Set up Your Network
Conclusion
Every industry has both business and technical jargon, expressions, and abbreviations using them will make it easy to communicate and express complicated topics in simple words. In this article, we have demonstrated the technical definitions of common abbreviations in the network industry.