Creativyst's Glossary of Industry Related Terms

Industry Terms

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(Creativyst™ Glossary)

A-Law

	A method of digitally encoding analogue signals that is used mostly in the USA. It is similar to another encoding scheme called uLaw, but uses different amplitude table mappings making it incompatible with uLaw encoding.

ABAN

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	See: Abandoned Calls

Abandoned Calls

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1. In the context of inbound call centers, an abandoned call is a call from someone who hung up while waiting to be served by an agent (presumably because he or she had to wait too long on hold).

2. In an outbound context an abandoned call is a call dialed by the predictive dialer that no agent was available to take. This is sometimes referred to as a nuisance call because the called party gets hung up on the instant he or she answers the phone. For this reason, many local authorities have mandated maximum rates for outgoing abandoned calls. Typically these mandated rates are around 5 percent.

Note: Statistics reported for abandoned calls include the number of calls abandoned in a given time period or by a given agent group (this hour, this shift, this month, etc.), or the percentage of the total number of calls taken that are abandoned (the "rate" or abandonment rate).

The label "abandoned calls" is sometimes shortened to ABAN or ABN in places where space is at a premium (such as call center readerboard systems).

See Also: Calls in Queue Queue Oldest Call Waiting

Abandoned

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	See: Abandoned Calls

ABN

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	See: Abandoned Calls

ACD

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	Automatic Call Distributor - System for automatically routing an incoming call to the next available AGENT or REP. There are many software and hardware systems on the market, which effectively handle these functions.
	See Also: PBX

ACORD

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Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development - An XML dialect for integrating transaction streams among agents, partners, and carriers in the insurance industry.

ACORD XML is a set of nearly 600 standard messaging formats for executing transactions and exchanging policy information in three areas of insurance: property/casualty, life, and re-insurance.

ACORD was designed to help bring about two important goals of the insurance processing industry: straight-through processing, which eliminates the need for manual intervention to manipulate date by integrating systems; and Single Entry Multiple Company Interface (SEMCI), which lets data be keyed in once and sent to multiple recipients regardless of platform.

See Also: CLI

Application Server

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	A computer that handles all operations between a company�s back-end applications or databases and the users� computers� Web browsers.

Application Service Provider

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	An organization that hosts software applications on its own servers allowing customers to access the application through private lines or through the Internet. In other words, a company that provides software functionality over the Internet or a private network for a fee. This is sometimes thought of as software rental, because it is purchased based on time.

Application Software

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	Software applications that are intended for end-users, such as database programs, word processors, and spreadsheets. Application software runs on top of system software.

ASA

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	See: Average Speed of Answer

ASCII

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	American Standard Code for Information Interchange (pronounced ASS-key): An 8-bit standard for coding western characters into computer readable binary words. The ASCII code is produced by ANSI and is known there as ANSI standard X6.4. There are two other identical international codes: the 7-Bit ISO 646 and Alphabet No. 5 of CCITT.
	See Also: ANSI X3.64

ASR

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	Automated Speech Recognition
	See Also: Speech Recognition VoiceXML IVR

Asynchronous Transfer Mode

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ATM - A high-speed cell switching network technology for LANs and WANs that handles data and real-time voice and video. It combines the high efficiency of packet switching used in data networks, with the guaranteed bandwidth of circuit switching used in voice networks and is currently used mostly by large WANS such as telephone companies or as backbones in large LAN installations. It was once thought that ATM would become popular to the desktop but its expense, coupled with tremendous improvements in Ethernet technology took ATM out of the running. ATM is widely implemented by telephone companies in their fiber loops (OCR-xx), ATM provides "bandwidth on demand" so customers can be charged for the amount of data they send rather than fixed-cost digital lines that often go underutilized.

ATA

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	Average Time to Answer
	See Also: Average Speed of Answer

ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode)

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	A network technology that organizes digital data into units and transmits them over a physical medium using digital signal technology. ATM is a key component of broadband ISDN.
	See Also: Asynchronous Transfer Mode

ATM

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	See: Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Atomic

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	See: Atomicity

Atomicity

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A property of a unit of work (a transaction) such that the operations of the unit of work are either all performed, or none of them are performed. For example, if entering a credit card sale is composed of three distinct steps (swipe, key in PIN, accept ammount) then the transaction should be atomic. That way, if the swipe machine shuts off after the first step is complete, the transaction will not be performed at all. Thus, there will be no partially completed transaction to deal with.

Authentication

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	The process of determining whether someone or something is, in fact, who it is declared to be; commonly done through the use of logon passwords or digital certificates.

Auto-attendant

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	An early name for what is now known as an Interactive Voice Response system or (IVR).
	See Also: IVR

Automated Attendant

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	An early name for what is now known as an Interactive Voice Response system or (IVR).
	See Also: IVR

Automated Speech Recognition

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	See: Speech Recognition

Automatic Call Distributor

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	See: ACD

Automatic Number Identification

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	See: ANI

Average Speed of Answer

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	ASA - Also called Average Seconds to Answer or Average Time to Answer (ATA). The average of the amount of time that has been taken to answer all calls in a given period (e.g. the last 15 minutes, today, this month). It is the total amount of time all calls waited to be answered divided by the total number of calls. It is often expressed in seconds.

Average Talk Time

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	The total talk time for a given group of non-abandoned calls (e.g. the total calls service in this hour, this shift, this entire industry, etc.) divided by the number of calls in the group.
	See Also: Talk Time After Call Work

Creativyst™ Glossary Terms and meanings ()

	AES - The cryptographically stronger successor to the Data Encryption Standard (DES); the selection of the AES algorithm involved submissions from around the world and was overseen by the US government's National Institute of Standards (NIST)
	See Also: Cryptography Encryption Data Encryption Standard

	ACW - Work that is required of an agent immediately following an inbound call. This often includes entering data, filling out forms and making outbound calls necessary to complete the transaction. The agent is considered unavailable to receive another inbound call while in this mode. This is also known as "Wrap-up" and "Post Call Processing" (PCP).

	A person manning the phones at a call center. Besides answering the phone to talk with clients and customers, an AGENT may perform any of a number of tasks depending on the industry s/he works in. Some tasks agents perform include product support, pre-sales support, help with problems, order taking, and client counseling.
	See Also: Rep Agent Group

	American National Standards Institute: One of the main standards bodies in the United States. ANSI oversees many of the telecommunications standards in America, including ASCII and X3.64 extensions. 2. Sometimes the X3.64 extension to ASCII (for controlling character mode screen writes) is generically referred to as ANSI as well.
	See Also: ASCII X3.64