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Glossary For Contact Centers

Key Definitions for Call Center and CX Professionals

Contact Center Terminology Guide provides clear definitions for essential terms and metrics in call center and customer experience fields. It's a vital tool for teams, enhancing communication with detailed explanations of industry-specific terminology.

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Agent Experience
Refers to the overall working conditions and environment that contact center agents are exposed to, including tools, training, and support provided to help them perform their job efficiently and effectively.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
A metric that calculates the average duration taken to resolve customer issues, including talk time, hold time, and after-call work, used to assess efficiency and customer service performance.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
The practice of hiring another company to handle business activities, such as call center operations, allowing the primary company to focus on core business strategies.
CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service)
A cloud-based solution that provides the necessary software for operating a contact center, offering scalability and flexibility without the need for physical infrastructure investments.
Contact Management
The practice of storing, tracking, and managing contact information and interactions with customers and clients, facilitating effective communication and relationship management.
Conversational Commerce
The use of chat, messaging, or other natural language technologies to interact with customers, enabling them to get recommendations, ask questions, and make purchases through conversational interfaces.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
A technology for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with current and potential customers, aiming to improve business relationships to grow your business.
Customer Experience Management (CXM)
A strategy that focuses on tracking, overseeing, and organizing every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle, aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
Direct Inward Dialing
A service that allows a company to allocate individual phone numbers to each employee without requiring a physical line into the PBX for each possible connection, facilitating direct calling to the desired desk without a manual transfer.
Identity Resolution
The process of matching an individual's interactions and data points across multiple channels to create a single, unified view of the customer, enhancing personalization and service accuracy.
IVR (Interactive Voice Response)
An automated telephony system that interacts with callers through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via keypad, directing callers to appropriate responses or departments.
Listening Post
A method or tool used to monitor and collect customer feedback across various touchpoints, helping organizations understand customer needs, expectations, and experiences.
Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
A subset of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand and interpret human language as it is spoken or written, enhancing interactions between humans and machines, particularly in customer service applications.
Schedule Adherence
A performance metric in contact centers that measures the degree to which agents adhere to their scheduled work times, including breaks, log-ins, and log-offs, crucial for maintaining service levels.
Text-To-Speech (TTS)
A technology that converts written text into spoken words, often used in contact centers to automate customer service responses and announcements.
UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service)
A cloud-based service offering integrated communication tools like telephony, video conferencing, and messaging, to streamline and enhance business communications.
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
A technology that allows voice to be transmitted over Internet Protocol networks, enabling more flexible and cheaper communication options compared to traditional telephony systems.
Workflow Management
The coordination of tasks and resources within an organization, ensuring that processes, such as customer inquiries and requests, are handled efficiently and effectively.
Workforce Management
The process of optimizing the productivity of employees through forecasting demand, scheduling staff, and managing performance in service-oriented companies like contact centers.
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