Acoustic Measurements.  In CallMiner Eureka, the measurement of acoustic signals for call duration, silence/noise, agitation, stress and tempo.

Ad-hoc Analysis and Search.  In CallMiner Eureka, when an analyst discovers/uncovers a previously unknown event, the ability to search for customer calls and associated snippets of customer calls without a set of predisposed notion of what to look for.

After-Call Work (ACW). Also called Wrap-up and Post Call Processing (PCP). Work that is necessitated by and immediately follows an inbound transaction. Often includes entering data,
filling out forms and making outbound calls necessary to complete the transaction. The agent is unavailable to receive another inbound call while in this mode

Agent. The person who handles incoming or outgoing calls. Also referred to as customer service representative (CSR), telephone sales or service representative (TSR), rep, associate, consultant, engineer, operator, technician, account executive, team member, customer service professional,
staff member, attendant and specialist. Did we miss any?

Agent Group. Also called Split, Gate, Queue or Skills Group. A collection of agents that share
a common set of skills, such as being able to handle customer complaints.

Agent Quality Index. Measurement of the Overall Agent performance gathered by measuring
such key indicators such as talk time, use of politeness and empathy, understandability.

Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). The specialized telephone system used in incoming call centers. It is a programmable device that automatically answers calls, queues calls, distributes calls to agents, plays delay announcements to callers and provides real-time and historical reports on these activities. May be a stand-alone system, or ACD capability built into a CO, network or PBX.

Automatic Number Identification (ANI). A telephone network feature that passes the number
of the phone the caller is using to the call center, real-time. ANI may arrive over the D channel of an ISDN PRI circuit (out of band signaling), or before the first ring on a single line (inband signaling). ANI is delivered from long distance companies. Caller ID is the local phone company version of ANI, and is delivered inband. ANI is a North American term, and Calling Line Identification (CLI) is an alternative term used elsewhere.

Available State. Agents who are signed on to the ACD and waiting for calls to arrive.

Available Time. The total time that an agent or agent group waited for calls to arrive,
for a given time period.

Average Handle Time (AHT). The sum of Average Talk Time and Average After-Call Work for
a specified time period.

Average Number of Agents. The average number of agents logged into a group for a specified time period

Base Staff. Also called Seated Agents. The minimum number of agents required to achieve service level and response time objectives for given period of time. Seated agent calculations assume that agents will be in their seats for the entire period of time. Therefore, schedules need to add in extra people to accommodate breaks, absenteeism and other factors that will keep agents from the phones. See Rostered Staff Factor.

Business Intelligence (BI).  Refers to skills, knowledge, technologies, applications and practices for to acquire understanding of the market behaviors and business context. BI employs collection, integration, analysis, interpretation and presentation of business information.  Enterprises use CallMiner to understanding the fundamentals of their business by automating the effort of listening to customer conversations. Eureka converts customer conversations into data; data can be measured; anything that can be measure can be improved.  CallMiner Eureka:

• Integrates with other sources of call related data or business data for aggregated analysis
• Has a reporting abstraction layer that provides categorization, attributes, call score, and acoustic output to third party data warehouses, analytics or business intelligence
  and reporting systems
• Has a search API that allows for direct call search through third party tools

Busy Hour. A telephone traffic engineering term, referring to the hour of time in which a trunk group carries the most traffic during the day. The average busy hour reflects the average over a period of days, such as two weeks. Busy Hour has little use for incoming call centers, which require more specific resource calculation methodologies.

Call Categorization.  Call categorization is the foundation of speech analytics.  In CallMiner Eureka, call categorization is automatic call disposition: identifying the reasons for the call, products or competitors mentioned, participant behaviors, procedural compliance and outcomes of every call.

Caller-Entered Digits (CED). Digits callers enter using their telephone keypads. The ACD, VRU,
or network can prompt for CEDs.

Call Center.  Synonymous with contact center.

Call Scoring. CallMiner Eureka calculates performance indicators per call and then rolls up indicators to aggregate indices for tracking key business performance such as customer satisfaction, agent quality, sales.  As a result, you can discover issues based on trends and anomalies in index and indicator scores.

Call Snippet.  Unique to CallMiner Eureka (not available in a phonetics application); words or phrases associated with a search. Made more popular by Google, the result of a search word or phrase.

Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). The software, hardware and programming necessary
to integrate computers and telephones so they can work together seamlessly and intelligently.

Contact Center.  Synonymous with call center but with the added modalities of conversation
to possibly include “chat” and “email”

Cost Center. An accounting term that refers to a department or function in the organization
that does not generate profit. See Profit Center.

Cost Per Call. Total costs (fixed and variable) divided by total calls for a given period of time.

Customer Satisfaction Index. Measurement of the Overall Customer Satisfaction gathered
by measuring such key indicators such as variations in politeness, dissatisfaction, length of call, understandability.

Database Call Handling. A CTI application, whereby the ACD works in sync with the database computer to process calls, based on information in the database. For example, a caller inputs digits into a voice processing system, the database retrieves information on that customer and then issues instructions to the ACD on how to handle the call (e.g., where to route the call, what priority the call should be given in queue, the announcements to play, etc.).

Dialed Number (DN). The number that the caller dialed to initiate the call.

Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS). A string of digits that the telephone network passes to the ACD, VRU or other devise, to indicate which number the caller dialed. The ACD can then process and report on that type of call according to user-defined criteria. One trunk group
can have many DNIS numbers.

Envelope Strategy. A strategy whereby enough agents are scheduled for the day or week to handle both the inbound call load and other types of work. Priorities are based on the inbound call load. When call load is heavy, all agents handle calls, but when it is light, some agents are reassigned to work that is not as time-sensitive.

Eureka!®  CallMiner's enterprise-proven speech analytics software platform.

First Call Resolution (FCR). The ability to answer a customer's question or issue in the context
of a single conversation.  CallMiner Eureka helps organizations improve FCR thereby improving customer satisfaction.  See CallMiner customer satisfaction solution.

Handling Time. The time an agent spends in Talk Time and After-Call Work, handling a transaction. Handling Time can also refer to the time it takes for a machine to process a transaction.

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). A set of international standards for telephone transmission. ISDN provides an end-to-end digital network, out-of-band signaling, and greater bandwidth than older telephone services. The two standard levels of ISDN are Basic Rate Interface (BRI) and Primary Rate Interface (PRI). See Basic Rate Interface and Primary Rate Interface.

J D Power Customer Satisfaction Award.  An industry recognition award for superior customer service by J.D. Power and Associates based on market research, forecasting, performance improvement, training and customer satisfaction.

Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR).  LVCSR systems are the predominate type of speech recognition systems used business, research and the government.

Root Cause Analysis.  Understanding not necessarily what the symptoms of an issue are,
but the underlying causes and factors that are creating the symptoms.

Monitoring. Also called Position Monitoring or Service Observing. The process of listening to agents' telephone calls for the purpose of maintaining quality. Monitoring can be: A) silent, where agents don't know when they are being monitored, B) side by side, where the person monitoring sits next to the agent and observes calls or C) record and review, where calls are recorded and then later played back and assessed.

Screen Monitoring. A system capability that enables a supervisor or manager to remotely monitor the activity on agents' computer terminals.

Screen Pop. A CTI capability. Callers' records are automatically retrieved (based on ANI or digits entered into the VRU) and delivered to agents, along with the calls.

Screen Refresh. The rate at which real-time information is updated on a display
(e.g. every 5 to 15 seconds). Note, screen refresh does not correlate with the time-frame used
for real-time calculations. See Real-Time Data.

Skill-Based Routing. An ACD capability that matches a caller's specific needs with an agent that has the skills to handle that call, on a real-time basis.

Speech Analytics (SA).  The science of understanding customer conversations.  CallMiner is the leader in enterprise speech analytics. CallMiner Eureka recognizes 100% of the call content -- language and acoustics -- providing comprehensive call search, automated call categorization and discovery of hot topics, trends and issues.

Supervisor Monitor. Computer monitors that enable supervisors to monitor the call handling statistics of their supervisory groups or teams.

Supervisor. The person who has front-line responsibility for a group of agents. Typical ratios are one supervisor to every 10-15 agents. However, help desks can have one supervisor for every
5 people, and some reservation centers have one supervisor for every 30 or 40 agents. Generally, supervisors are equipped with special telephones and computer terminals that enable them to monitor agent activities.

Talk Time. The time an agent spends with a caller during a transaction. Includes everything from "hello" to "goodbye."

Total Cost of Use (TCU).  Expanding the total cost of ownership (TCO) calculations to include the cost of the use of the system and not just operations.  Taking into account such factors as the cost
of the day to day users and their time and expense.

Unproductive Dispatch.  A term used in the communications and utilities industry that means unnecessary truck roll as a result of not being able to resolve the customer's issue in the contact center.  See call center efficiencies.

VSR. VSR stands for Virtual Server Room and is CallMiner’s patent-pending distributed parallel computing platform. VSR enables CallMiner Eureka to utilize idle computing resources in the enterprise network to convert audio recordings into minable data.

Voice Processing. A blanket term that refers to any combination of voice processing technologies, including Voice Mail, Automated Attendant, Audiotex, Voice Response Unit (VRU) and Faxback.

Voice Response Unit (VRU). Also called Interactive Voice Response Unit (IVR) or Audio Response Unit (ARU). A VRU responds to caller entered digits or speech recognition in much the same way that a conventional computer responds to keystrokes or clicks of a mouse. When the VRU is integrated with database computers, callers can interact with databases to check current information (e.g., account balances) and complete transactions (e.g. make transfers between accounts). See Voice Processing.

Workforce Management Software. Software systems that, depending on available modules, forecast call load, calculate staff requirements, organize schedules and track real-time performance of individuals and groups.

Wrap-Up Codes. Codes agents enter into the ACD to identify the types of calls they are handling. The ACD can then generate reports on call types, by handling time, time of day, etc.