jargon

Manpower planning-It's the process of developing and determining objectives,    policies and programmes in an organisation that will develop, utilise and  distribute manpower in order to achieve economic and other goals.

Career service : A Service which a person joins at a very young age and   continues throughout his life till retirement in the same service.

Seniority-Length of service counted from the date of joining the service.

Efficiency rating : Comparative evaluation of the performance of an employee   on the basis of his part service records.

Service record : Personnel record of service about an employee maintained    by his office

Entry-point-In civil service period after the selection but before the    actual placement of job.

Patronage system of recruitment : This type of system is also called spoils   system. patronage in this is seen as means of political control, the proteges of the ministers or the elected functionaries are nominated to the civil service. The public jobs are distributed as personal or political favours to their supporters. The system prevailed in Britain and USA.

Hierarchy of needs : Abraham Maslow, in 1943 outlined the overall theory of  motivation in his classic paper 'A thoery of Human Motivatin'. He analysed the relationship between the human beings and organisations from the stand point of 'Human needs'. According to him, a person's motivatoinal needs are arranged in hierarchical manner running from lower to higher level. These needs are physiological, security, social, esteem and self actualisation needs. Fulfilment of each need is a goal to a person at a point of time and hence once that need is satisfied, the person moves to the next order need. This process continues in the daily life of all human beings.

Plateaued employee: An employee whose career reaches a stage when job functions and work content remain the same, with no chnage or further development. This condition demotivates the employee in work performance.

Position classification :  It's the process of categorisation of positions in the organisation into groups or classes on the basis of their duties,  responsibities, qualification, skills required to perform them. Here duties and responsibilities of positions determine pay and qualification requirement  of persons.

Square peg-in-a round-hole-It is an informal expression meant to describe someone who does not seem to be suitable to fit into a particular position.

Succession planning : An exercise done with the objective of providing   continuity in succession or movement of qualified people to the positions in the organisation as and when the opportunities arise.

Case-study method : It's a technique of training which utilises actual or created problems as cases for trainees, who are expected to discuss, analyse the case and arrive at a course of action.

City-state : A state consisting of a sovereign city and its dependencies.

Commune : An association whose members own everything in common, including the product of their   labour.

Trotskyism : The theory of communism of leon trotsky, russian revoluntionary and writer, in   which he called for immediate worldwide revolution by the proletariat.

Seniority-Length of service counted from the date of joining the service.

Square peg-in-a round-hole-It is an informal expression meant to describe someone who does not seem to be suitable to fit into a particular position.

Utopia : Any real or imaginary society, place, state etc considered  to be perfect or ideal.

Empirical : Based or acting on observation and experiment not on theory.

Hypothesis : A proposition or supposition made from known facts as the basis for reasoning         of investigation.

Utopia : Any real or imaginary society, place, state etc considered  to be perfect or ideal.

Job analysis :  Systematic examination, determination of nature, characteristics, functions,         activities of a job and knowledge, skills, experience necessary to perform it.

Socialist country : A country where the community as a whole owns and controls the means of    production, distribution and exchange.

Human capital-Sum total of knowledge, skills and aptitudes of the people   in the society.

Network solutions -Access to the various services is via a combination of the call centre’s internet connection and the standard PSTN networks. Allows for total geographic independence and provides complete disaster recovery (DR) solution. Dialling equipment is physically located in multiple locations.

Make Busy – Setting inbound telephone lines to return a busy tone to downsize incoming calls to understaffed groups.

Legacy systems -In order for the agent to transact business with the customer they may have to use ‘old’ computer systems that the company has had for many years. Typically these systems are not as user friendly as more modern ones as they may require the agent to remember codes, use lots of screens and do not have a logical flow about them.

List Management  – Managing telephone number lists, including sorting, selecting, importing or exporting telephone number records for outbound calling campaigns.

Leased line -A dedicated circuit, supplied by the PTT or other licensed operator, which permanently connects two or more user locations and is for the sole use of the subscriber.

Monitoring or Service Observation  – Listening to agents’ telephone calls to assess the quality with which the call is handled.  Monitoring can be silent, announced, side-by-side, or recorded for later review.

Invisible Queue  – A term for when callers wait on hold but have no idea of the wait time.

Intraflow or Overflow  – Calls that are redistributed between agent groups within an ACD to balance workload, minimize caller delay, or handle call overflow.

Home Agent or Remote Agent  – An agent that works from home or outside of the contact center location, such as at a branch office.

Internet Protocol (IP)  – A data networking protocol for submitting and receiving data packets over the Internet.

Hosted Solution -A contact centre uses telephony equipment that is rented, with the equipment at a remote location. Voice is sent either over telephone lines or VoIP, and data connection is made via the internet. A cost effective method, a hosted solution is used increasingly as an enhancement, an addition or a replacement to existing on-site technology.

Historical Data -All data that has been recorded and is not shown in real time is called historical data. Historical data is used to compile useful management information reports for contact centre supervisors and staff.

Hit Rate  – The number of connected calls as a percent of the number of attempts.

Handle Time  – The time an agent spends on the call plus after work time.

Handled Call  – A call answered by an agent.

Ghost Call  – A call wherein the person on the other end cannot be heard. Most CSR/TSR love this.

Erlang Models  – Traffic engineering techniques utilized to determine numbers of facilities required in route selection, call attempts, staffing needs and other telecommunications scenarios.

Delay or Queue Time  – The time callers remain in queue waiting for an agent.

Delay Announcements  – Recordings played to callers on hold.

Data Mart or Data Warehouse  – A static database of historical data used for reporting, usually updated daily.

Cordless Telephone  (second generation)(CT2)-A world-wide standard for digital cordless telephony. As established in the UK, CT2 uses 4MHz of channel frequency between 864.150 MHz and 868.05MHz.

Call-scan -Callscan is the product name of the management information system for the Realitis ACD. Callscan has 2 models available, single-user and multi-user

Call-Path -A standard for CTI closely, but not exclusively, associated with IBM. Realitis ACD supports CallPath

Call-centre  A Call centre is a business function, usually comprising a set of ACD agent groups, dedicated to servicing transactions over the telephone.

Conference call(CC)- A call including more than two parties. A conference may be initiated by an agent or from another source.

Call center (CC) - A call center is a physical place where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organization, usually with some amount of computer automation.

Busy Hour  – The hour in which the largest number of calls/contacts are offered.  Some businesses will have more than one peak call time.

Blocked Call  – A call that cannot be completed.

Blended Services  –  services that dynamically adjust outbound dialing levels as inbound call volumes fluctuate to balance call load.  This adjustment allows agents to receive both inbound and outbound calls simultaneously, and for those calls to be placed or answered with maximum efficiency.

Disaster Recovery(DR)  - the process, policies and procedures of restoring operations critical to the resumption of business, including regaining access to data (records, hardware, software, etc.), communications (incoming, outgoing, toll-free, fax, etc.), workspace, and other business processes after a natural or human-induced disaster.

Directory Number(DN) -The number listed to be dialled by customers for connection to a particular answering point. Each agent position or telephone within a network may have a unique  directory number.

Contact Rate  – Measure for successfully connected inbound and outbound calls in a .

Contact Management   – Software that keep tracks of all customer contacts.

Caller ID  – A service that shows the telephone number of the caller.

Channel Agnostic -Provision of a (centralised) process or interaction route, irrespective of the interaction channel.

Call Avoidance -A proactive strategy to reduce the number of unwanted or low value calls-for example failure avoidance by eliminating repeat calls; or call automation through self-service.

call-back - back messaging, in a  context, is a service that allows callers to leave a message (usually personal contact information, either spoken or through the number pad) so that an agent can call them back and they retain their place in the queue.

Balanced Scorecard -A scorecard that shows a range of measures - typically based around graphs or traffic lights - that shows on a single sheet of paper how a call centre is performing.

Busy hour  -The continuous 60 minute period during any measurable period when the calls handled by the system is at maximum.

Break out -The ability to dial across a private network and to then access an exchange line at a suitable terminal PBX in order to enable the call to be charged at the "local rate"

Break in -The ability to dial directly into a local PBX and then across a private network of PBX systems from an external exchange line.

Blended agent(BA)  - A blended agent, in a  or contact center context, is an agent who manages both incoming and outgoing calls and applications as needed.

Agent Status(AS) -The Agent status at a particular point in time e.g. wait, talk, wrap, idle, unavailable.

Available Time (AT)- Amount of time an Agent spends on a call or waiting for a call.

Auto Diallers -Do as they say in the title. They are very prominent in overseas call centres where regulations are a little easier around there deployment. They generate an outbound call to you, and then find an agent to complete the call. A great time saver, but can result in "silent" calls if an agent is not available! There are kinder versions that simply allow an Agent to make a call from screen, at a click of a button. These are commonly part of the major CRM applications.

Agent Management(AM) -The ability to understand how well Agents make and receive calls, both quantity and quality. Normally achieved by using an "ACD" system, management is normally achieved by using real time and historic information to compare agents' performance.

Activity Codes (AC) – Codes entered by agents at the end of a call to indicate the type of contact handled.

Abandoned call(AC)  - An abandoned call is a call or other type of contact initiated to a  that is ended before any conversation occurs.

Automated Attendant(AA)  – Answers callers with a recording and menu choices, like an Interactive Voice system.

Switch  -A switching system providing telephone communications between internal stations and external telephone networks. The term generally refers to manually operated switching equipment as opposed to computer operated switching.

Split, Gate or Group  – When an ACD routes calls arriving on specific trunks or handling predefined transaction types to be answered by specific agents.

Ring Delay, or Delay Before Answer  – A setting on the ACD-PBX that adjusts the number of rings before the system automatically answers the call.

ReDial  – Dialing a telephone number multiple times after the initial attempt.

Virtualization -The means by which a series of disparate processes or systems is combined to provide a single service offering. See also SOA (Service Orientated Architecture).

Virtual – A  that uses a distributed workforce comprised of remote agents, at home agents, or agents in various decentralized office locations that uses hosted or IP communications.

Turret -This is one of the most baffling uses of jargon in a call centre, but effectively means an agent telephone set. This term was commonly used in the 1980s and 1990s but is not so widespread today. Usually the term teleset is used these days.

Teleset -The telephone set used by an agent in a call centre. It often has other functions (the ability to log on etc) to a normal telephone set. The term TeleSet was first termed by Aspect but has more recently come to be used as any agent telephone set.

Trunk  -An individual circuit, provided by either a public network operator or via a private network capable of carrying an individual telephone call (either incoming or outgoing). Trunk  – Transmission channel between switching centers or nodes. Trunk, Trunks -Not the storage area of a car, but a word to describe the telephone lines coming into a call centre. The word "trunk" could easily and less confusing be replaced by the word "telephone line."

Tandem -An exchange used to switch network traffic between other nodes.

Script  – Words and branching logic for an agent to follow when they place or receive a call.

Schedule  – Days of week worked, start time, break times and durations (as well as paid/unpaid status), and stop time for a  agent.

Nuisance Call  – A call when a live contact is made, but no live agent is available, resulting in dead air to the customer.

Queue  – A queue holds an incoming or outgoing call until an agent is available.

Outsourcing  – Contracting with an outside company to handle customer calls.

Occupancy  – The percent of logged in time that an agent spends in active contact handling.

Node -An intelligent routing point on the telephone network, for example an ACD or PBX.

Network  -A network provides users with communications links between different geographical locations

Multimedia  -A combination of two or more media (i.e. voice, data, still image, video)

Modem -A device that modulates and demodulates signals transmitted over communications facilities. It is used to allow digital signals to be sent over analogue lines.

Interflow  – Call flow out of the dialer to another site, voice mail system, or telephone number.  Allows calls to be rerouted to a predefined destination.

 EuroISDN -A name for ISDN as defined by the relevant European ETSI standards

Erlang  – Measures telecommunication traffic usage.  One Erlang equals 3600 seconds of usage in one hour.

Dialler (or predictive dialler) -Software platform which automatically dials preloaded lists for Outbound campaigns, reports on the outcomes of those call attempts and can also reorganise call attempts that have not been answered to be retried again automatically at a later time/date. Diallers come with very sophisticated reporting, campaign tracking and call blending functionality, which greatly increases efficiencies of outbound operations.

Erlang C -Used to calculate waiting times, based on the number of Agents available, the number of callers and the average time it takes to handle a call.

Erlang B -Developed by A K Erlang. Used to determine the number of trunks required to handle a known calling load during a one hour period

Manned -An agent is said to be manned if he is logged in and is able to take incoming calls.

Queue- A queue is a number of calls that are waiting to be answered by agents in an ACD queue. The calls are usually assigned to available agents in a first-arrived, first-answered basis. The queue is the "line up" where incoming calls wait until they are answered. The queue sometimes refers to the group of agents available to answer incoming calls to an ACD queue.

Monitoring - The practice of listening to agents' telephone calls to  assess the quality with which the call is handled. Also called service  observation. May be silent, announced, side-by-side, or recorded for later  review.

multiplexer  -A device that enables more than one signal to be sent simultaneously over one physical channel.

shrinkage  -  shrinkage is a measure of how much time is lost in the  to things like vacation, breaks, lunch, holidays, sick time, training and so on.

Churnover - Staff that leaves the contact center to work elsewhere in the organization.

Coach -The person who provides additional support and technical knowledge to Agents. (In addition to the Team Leader). Also known as a buddy.(Floor support)

Blockage  -A state in which all trunks in a specific trunk group are busy. May occur when all trunks are actually occupied with calls, or when some portion of the trunks are artificially blocked by system user in periods of understaffing to minimize number of calls in queue.

AGENTS -The person who receives and makes customer telephone calls. May also deal with customer correspondence and customer e-mails. Also known as Customer Advisor or Customer Representative.

Succession planning : An exercise done with the objective of providing   continuity in succession or movement of qualified people to the positions in the organisation as and when the opportunities arise.

Case-study method : It's a technique of training which utilises actual or created problems as cases for trainees, who are expected to discuss, analyse the case and arrive at a course of action.

Plateaued employee:An employee whose career reaches a stage when job functions and work content remain the same, with no chnage or further development. This condition demotivates the employee in work performance.

Position classification :  It's the process of categorisation of positions in the organisation into groups or classes on the basis of their duties,  responsibities, qualification, skills required to perform them. Here duties and responsibilities of positions determine pay and qualification requirement  of persons.

Hierarchy of needs : Abraham Maslow, in 1943 outlined the overall theory of  motivation in his classic paper 'A thoery of Human Motivatin'. He analysed the relationship between the human beings and organisations from the stand point of 'Human needs'. According to him, a person's motivatoinal needs are arranged in hierarchical manner running from lower to higher level. These needs are physiological, security, social, esteem and self actualisation needs. Fulfilment of each need is a goal to a person at a point of time and hence once that need is satisfied, the person moves to the next order need. This process continues in the daily life of all human beings.

Patronage system of recruitment : This type of system is also called spoils   system. patronage in this is seen as means of political control, the proteges of the ministers or the elected functionaries are nominated to the civil service. The public jobs are distributed as personal or political favours to their supporters. The system prevailed in Britain and USA.

Entry-point-In civil service period after the selection but before the    actual placement of job.

Service record : Personnel record of service about an employee maintained    by his office.

Plural society : A society having groups of distinct ethnic  origin, cultural forms, religion etc.