Call center solutions are very popular these days. There are many businesses that have already started using call center software and there are some that are thinking of adopting the one. Knowing a platform and all technical terminologies related to that helps in using it at its best.
In this blog post, I will share the glossary of a standard call center software. I will try to cover the terms generally used for agents who attend all incoming and outgoing calls. In all call center solutions, you will find these terms.
Agent: A call center executive, called, an agent is a person who is accountable for attending inbound and outbound calls or any other means of communication with the prospects or clients in the company that uses call center software.
Manager: A call center representative who designs call center campaigns, supervises agents, and makes sure the organization uses a call center solution to achieve the predefined goals.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR): It works as an auto-attended in a call center. It greets the callers and lets them choose options by dialing numbers on their phones to take a predefined action or connect to an appropriate department. For instance, Press 1 for Technical support, Press 2 for Sales, Press 3 for Accounts, and more.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR): With the least intervention of the agent, this feature manages approximately the whole call, enabling call centers to employ natural language. They empower callers to interact with the call center software by speaking rather than dialing buttons to take certain actions or to reach a specific agent or department.
Queue: It is the ‘waiting line’, thus called, a call queue or queue. In the queue, the caller needs to wait until the next agent is available to take the call.
Abandoned Call: When a call is terminated before a caller connects to the agent is called an abandoned call and the average of total abandoned calls is called Call Abandoned Ratio.
Busy Hour Call Attempts (BHCA): It is the number of attempts made by a caller during the most hectic hour of the day. It is applied to assess the capability of communications channels.
Hit Rate: It is the number of connected connections as per the number of tries. This KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is applied to evaluate the performance correlated with the outgoing campaigns. It is quite like the success rate of the attempts made. For example, it is the number of items traded as per the number of prospects who visited the e-commerce website built with Magento development.
Call Center Shrinkage: It estimates the total time lost in different things such as breaks, lunch, training, etc.
Call Blending: This procedure is utilized when the agent ought to make more outgoing calls and to simplify the demand of incoming and outgoing calls. It establishes the policy that at a precise time, the agent will take fewer incoming calls and vice versa.
Call Logging: Also called call recording and voice logging. It records calls in the call center. Generally, calls are logged for quality and training purposes.
Screen Popup: It automatically shows all the important information of the caller on the call center agent interface as soon as a call is connected. It helps agents to provide better responses.
Co-Browsing: Also called collaborative browsing is a feature, available only in advanced call center solutions. It lets agents interact with the customers or prospects via the web browser to explain to them something or to assist them if they are stuck somewhere. It is also known as a screen sharing feature.
Automatic Callback: If a caller receives a busy tone, then this call center dialer feature can be selected by the caller. On selection of this feature, the call center software calls back the caller when the queue is free and the agent is available to take the call.
Automated Call Broadcast: This feature is available in advanced call center solutions. It is utilized when there is a requirement to send the same message to all or a group of contacts. Here a message can be an announcement, marketing message, new product launch, etc. It is a telephone message that is broadcast and transmitted to all selected recipients.
Automatic Call Distributor (ACD): It is a feature that routes inbound calls automatically to the available agents depending on various criteria, for example, a choice made by the caller through an IVR.
Skill-Based Routing: It is a call routing feature, which routes the call of a caller to an agent who holds the most competent skills to manage the caller rather than routing to the earliest available agent.
Sticky Agent: It is a call routing strategy, which connects a caller to the same agent every time it calls.
Random Call Routing: It is another call routing rule, which randomly assigns calls to any available agent.
Idle Agent Call Routing: Another call routing strategy, that routes a call to an agent who is idle for the longest.
Least Talktime Call Routing: This call routing strategy route calls to the agent who has the least talk time. It also indicates routing a call to the agent that has handled fewer calls.
Round Robin Call Routing: This call routing strategy routes all incoming calls in a round-robin fashion. It means the first agent gets the first call, then the second and it continues till the last agent. Then, it again routes a call to the first agent.
Manual Dialer: The call center software offers a dialer, which looks like a phone dial pad. The agents can manually dial a number to connect a call. The process of manual dialing is the same as making a call from the phone.
Auto Dialer: It automatically dials calls one after another. It saves time from manually dialing. There are different types of auto dialers available in different call center solutions.
Preview Dialer: It is an autodialer, which enables an agent to view the next call in the queue with a preview of the caller. An agent can choose to attend or to hop on the call. In the matter of more intricate campaigns, the preview dialer is an excellent feature as agents take only those calls that they are comfortable attending.
Progressive Dialer: It is an auto dialer, which shows the customer information to an agent before dialing the number. In this approach, the agent can get prepared before taking the call.
Power Dialer: It is used when the numbers are dialed one by one spontaneously. In the event of busy, no answer, or reject calls, the next number is dialed without any lag.
Predictive Dialer: It dials the numbers sequentially even when no agent is available to take the call. The term ‘Predictive’ is applied as well in advance it predicts the availability of the agent and further estimates the time in which the live customer or prospect will respond to the call. Therefore, employing statistical algorithms, time wasted by agents in idling between a call and a queue is reduced.
Pacing Ratio: This is the ratio in which a predictive dialer will make outgoing calls and route the connected calls to the agents.
These are the major terms related to agents. We will check more call center solution-related terms for managers in the next blog. Keep reading.
