Glossary of Contact Center Terms

UJET technology that augments human conversations with artificial intelligence. Conversational AI technology helps the agent deliver the best possible customer experience. The virtual agent can assist a live agent with AI-driven recommendations, real-time sentiment analysis, and by surfacing relevant knowledge base content on the fly.

A feature that allows callers to avoid waiting on hold for long periods of time, and instead choose a time to receive a call back from a customer service agent at a later time.

The ACD is a form of automated switchboard, which answers incoming calls and forwards them to the appropriate agent or department to resolve the caller’s issue. Many different distribution schemes are available for ACDs to utilize, from standard round-robin and least active, to UJET's Multicast and Deltacast routing.

ANI, or Caller ID, is a way to identify a caller by their phone number.  With this value in hand, the contact center agent or software can take actions such as performing an account lookup, retrieving interaction history, and more. 

Technology that allows humans and computers to interact using conversational syntax. This technology is used in features like IVRs with speech recognition or directed dialogue capabilities, and may also be found in some chatbots.

Technology that boosts efficiency by delegating processes that an agent would normally handle, and instead having software partially or fully handle those tasks.  This frees up agent time and improves focus.  

The amount of time an agent spends handling each customer call, calculated as an average from all their interactions in a given time frame.

Streamlining and aligning back office workforce functions in a call center to be consistent with front-office services, to improve efficiency and the customer experience.

Also sometimes called a Chatbot, a bot is an artificial intelligence (AI) software that automates parts of the customer journey or assists agents, to help make call centers more efficient and deliver higher customer satisfaction.

The process of measuring productivity, performance, and efficiency in a contact center to highlight areas of improvement.

Outsourcing certain business functions to a third party.  Some companies choose to outsource their contact center operations to third-party firms who are experts in that field.  

Go beyond omnichannel with predictive, contextual, and conversational CX built for how modern consumers communicate.

A computer application that monitors telephone calls. CT Connect is often used in contact centers.

An operation that supports inbound and outbound communication between customers and a business, usually for sales, customer service, or technical support.  Call centers are often the first line of communication between customers and a business, and are thus crucial in shaping customer experience, company reputation, online reviews, and more.

Also called the “agent desktop” or “agent workspace,” a unified portal and/or standalone application for call center agents to handle customer interactions and resolve tickets.  When integrated with popular CRMs like Salesforce or Kustomer, the agent software may take the form of an inline call control module that appears within the CRM and is easily accessible at all times.

(Call Center Customer Relationship Management)Also called “Contact Center CRM,” a call center CRM is essentially a database with often-extensive detail on the company's various customers. The CRM provides agents with information about a customer to personalize their experience, and facilitates sales, changes, upgrades, refunds, and much more.

Tracking the performance of a contact center against various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and goal metrics, to improve customer outcomes and enhance staff skillsets.

The different ways a customer interacts with a business, which may include voice and digital channels, email, and chat.  UJET's CCaaS 3.0 adds additional capabilities, such as sharing screenshots and video, using biometric authentication, and more.

A messaging platform built into a business’s website and/or app that helps customers access customer service quickly and easily. Chats may be monitored and/or assisted by supervisors.

(See also: Bot) An AI function that improves the efficiency of contact centers by routing customer inquiries on voice and digital channels.  Bots may also perform more advanced actions such as helping customers (or agents) find relevant knowledge base content, automating common tasks, looking up purchase history, and more.

A UJET feature that reduces effort and errors associated with manual dialing, and increases the number of customers an outbound agent can reach in a given time period.

see “CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service)” 

A technology that allows an agent and a customer to share screens and navigate the same browser during a call.   Co-browse can be also be used within apps; the agent can help a customer make a purchase, find an important detail, locate certain documents, and more.

Adhering to the rules, regulations, and laws of a particular industry or location.  UJET offers compliance with a wide range of privacy and security regimes (see https://ujet.cx/security).

Technology that provides an interface between telephone networks and computer systems. CTI is the underlying function that allows a call placed by a caller through the PSTN to reach an agent in a contact center, whereby that agent can answer the call on their desktop/laptop computer or other similarly capable device.

A customer service representative or call center agent who handles inbound and/or outbound calls, and may also cover other channels and modes of communication. 

The set of strategies used to improve the omnichannel customer experience though enhancing the attributes of the contact center workforce.  WFO can include agent engagement, training, coaching, evaluations, rewards, and more.

A disposition is a status that is assigned to an interaction after completion by either the agent or the operating system.  Examples: "demo scheduled," "upsell opportunity," "at-risk," etc.

A system that consolidates contacts into one desktop interface for easier navigation and management.

UJET leverages data from your CRM to prioritize routing decisions, and help determine customer intent; the goal is to route more efficiently and accurately and thus drive customer experience.

When an agent or sales rep suggests a customer purchase an additional product or service, ideally by outlining the value, use case, and the pain points that could be addressed.

A metric used to measure how much effort a customer must expend to resolve an issue or purchase a product.  The lower the score, the better.

The experience a customer has when interacting with your company throughout the customer lifecycle.  CX can also be thought of as the contact center platform designed to improve your customer experience, such as UJET.

A strategy used to improve and optimize customer experience and engagement.

The software and systems used to manage the customer experience.

Software that reviews and assesses transcripts and voice recordings from channels like voice, email, and chat.  Typically the software will attempt to apply some kind of meaningful scoring to the interaction, such as sentiment scores or whether a resolution was reached.

Also known as the “customer lifecycle,” the customer journey refers to the entire experience a customer has with a company from the first touchpoint to the last.  The journey for any given customer is likely to include various incidents involving both positive and negative sentiment - both of which can provide valuable insight and learning for the contact center team.

The strategies and software used to provide excellent omnichannel customer experience throughout the customer journey.  

The process of improving the customer experience over the entire lifecycle of the customer, meaning the time that customer is with a given company.

A metric calculated through customer satisfaction surveys, used to measure how well a company meets its customers’ service expectations.

An agent who provides customer support.  Agents can connect with customers through numerous channels (voice, chat, SMS, e-mail, social, etc.) and typically help customers resolve a variety of inquiries/issues.

A computer display of real-time personal and business information about a caller, their contact center touchpoints, relevant KPIs or other metrics, and other information that aids agents in a call center as they work to help the customer.

Deltacast routing logic from UJET focuses on optimizing for chat concurrency and distributing workload equally between agents.

A contact center that supports multi-channel digital communications, including email, chat, SMS, social media, and others.

Direct access points allow your customers to dial a certain number and be connected directly to an appropriate queue, which can reduce friction and improve the customer experience.  DAPs can also be based on a lookup of user data, or even on a key/value pair sent outside of the CRM (in other words, they are not limited to phone numbers).  

Components of the UJET web SDK. Each provides an additional channel by which customers can communicate, and all are embeddable within your app or website.

Transferring a challenging, complex, or unusual interaction to a supervisor for further help and resolution.

XML format of a syntax that represents grammars used in speech recognition, so developers can specify keywords or phrases that a speech recognizer should listen for.

A contact center that handles a large number of incoming calls. Inbound contact centers typically handle customer service, billing, or technical support inquiries. These centers typically do not handle outbound campaigns.

An organization that creates and distributes software that is compatible with another organization’s hardware, operating systems, and/or cloud platforms.

Interactive Voice Response generally refers to the "menu" component of a contact center, wherein the caller can make certain selections that influence routing. Despite the name, most IVRs rely on numeric keypad input. Some common uses of IVR are to route calls in a queue, leave a message, or make a payment. Directed Dialogue and Natural Language Processing are present in some IVRs. More advanced vendors such as UJET offer Touch IVR, which represents the menu visually and allows the caller to directly select the option of interest (similar to clicking navigation items in a website menu).

A workforce management system that monitors the day’s current call volume and trends so managers can make changes if needed.

A unit of measurement that tracks the progress of a team or individual toward previously set performance goals.  In the context of a contact center, a KPI could be a specific goal (e.g. new purchase, upsell, referral to friend, move to different plan) or experience related to the phase a customer is experiencing in their customer journey.

A system that defines a workflow by monitoring an agent’s keystrokes.

A centralized monitor that shows agents their progress toward team goals compared to that of their colleagues.  Leaderboards typically also display the team's aggregate progress; the goal is to promote healthy competition and also to boost team morale and help the group operate effectively together.

A communication network in a limited geographical area, such as homes, offices, campuses, etc.  Contrast with WAN.

Complete developer toolkits to deploy CX widgets and help orchestrate the customer journey, on the devices the vast majority of customers prefer: modern smartphones.  Compatible with iOS and Android.

Also called voice control or voice access, mobile voice is a technology that allows users to control a mobile device by a spoken command.  An example of this is Siri on the iPhone.

A call center that integrates multiple touch points - including voice, text, social media, and chat - that runs on cloud-native software, rather than on-premise hardware. UJET is a multichannel cloud contact center platform.

A call center that uses cloud-native software (instead of in-house hardware) to handle inbound and outbound calls across multiple, integrated communication channels, including voice, chat, email, text, and more.  Omnichannel typically implies the ability not only to communicate via multiple channels, but to move seamlessly between them - however, few if any vendors have fully delivered on this promise.

A personalized customer experience where individual interactions seamlessly integrate across channels to create one holistic experience.

The interactions between a customer or prospect and the company across multiple channels, at the time of the sale and over the customer journey. Implies the ability for agents to easily move between communications channels as they serve customers.

A call center management system that proactively routes inbound and outbound contacts across multiple channels using apps like ACD, IVR, and AI chatbots. Omnichannel also implies the ability for customers to seamlessly move *between* channels on the fly - however, very few vendors approach this level of customer ease.

A UJET feature that deflects interactions using an automated message when a call is placed in a queue and not answered in a predefined amount of time.

A system used by contact centers to track, report on, and improve historical, transactional, and real-time employee performance data.

A virtual line-up scheme, wherein a customer waits to be connected to an agent and has their place in queue maintained. Queues offer various routing schemes, and some of them are partially or entirely manned by chatbots. Other queues may use AI to adaptively route interactions as needed.

Contact center SLAs generally consist of top-level metrics, and help supervisors and managers to ensure the center is essentially meeting its service targets. One common example is X percentage of calls, answered in Y period of time - for example, the center may aim to answer 80% of calls within one minute. Unlike other SLAs, the contact center SLA tends to be internal guidance for the team of agents and supervisors.  It is generally not tied to direct financial compensation for the customer, and instead represents a high-level target of acceptable service.

An AI tool that picks up on the customer’s disposition or feeling about the company during an interaction.

Also known as texting, SMS is one of the fastest-growing contact channels.

A UJET technology that allows an agent to communicate visually and contextually with callers. Smart Actions help agents resolve calls faster by allowing them to verify customers using fingerprint and facial recognition, send and receive images and videos, receive text inputs, request secure payments, and more.

Softphones are essentially software-based versions of hardware telephones.  They may exist as a dialer app on a smartphone, or a stand-alone app on a laptop or desktop computer.  Softphones offer comparable or even enhanced phone capabilities to traditional phones, and - unlike traditional hardware - can typically place calls via the PSTN, via pure IP telephony, or a blend of the two.  

A vendor who provides software based in the cloud, and generally available on a subscription basis.  SaaS vendors cover a plethora of products and services, such as engineering design software (AutoDesk), customer relationship management (Salesforce, Kustomer), contact center and customer experience (UJET), and many more.  One defining characteristic is that SaaS vendors typically require little or no upfront investment, and charge only a monthly license/seat fee.

Transmission control protocol/internet protocol.

A feature that converts text to synthesized speech.

An AI-powered conversational CX agent for 24/7 self-service. Virtual Agents can speed up human interactions and resolutions, or in some cases handle the interactions in an agent's stead.

A set of insights based on customer preferences, satisfaction, priorities, and more. 

A feature that allows a user to initiate a voice call to the contact center within the app.

A biometric verification tool that identifies a caller based on their voice.

The PSTN component of a call that connects a voice application to a telephony system used in a contact center. While the PSTN is very commonly used, it may not be necessary in pure IP calls.

Generalized term for the overall disposition a customer has towards your company, as a result of their various touchpoints with you. VoC also attempts to gauge customer preferences, and can help to identify gaps and opportunities. It can be measured in several ways, including feedback provided directly to your company, as well as online reviews.

VoiP is an industry term for the technologies that allow for voice calls to be made using IP-enabled devices and apps rather than relying purely on legacy PBX hardware and PSTN technology. Calls made to or from VoiP endpoints often interact with the PSTN in some way, especially if one party is using a VoiP endpoint and the other is using an analog one. However, VoiP calls can also remain entirely on IP devices and networks.

A software development kit (SDK) is a set of tools provided by a software or hardware vendor. UJET’s SDKs proactively engage customers at the right time and use web page views and CRM data to route visitors to the right team. 

See “Chat”

A system that tracks the optimal execution of business processes to improve efficiency.  Workflow in a contact center may also refer to the sequence of typical tasks relating to customer interactions (e.g. initial answer, look into details, determine an answer/resolution, handle wrap-up tasks, etc.).