Call Center Glossary !

Audio Text - A pre-recorded message heard by system users.

Automated Attendant - A specialized form of an Interactive Voice Response system .Automated Attendants help manage the flow of incoming calls by automatically answering them without the intervention of a live operator. They are designed for departments that receive a large volume of incoming calls, or those that may not have enough staff to handle incoming call traffic. An automated attendant is customized software that responds to touch-tone input and routes callers to specific extensions, provides access to prerecorded information, and take messages 24 hours a day.

Automatic Number Identification (ANI) - A call center uses ANI to track the phone numbers of persons calling the call center. Useful for reporting crank or threatening callers to the appropriate authorities. Caller ID is the public telephone network version of ANI.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) - Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is technology that allows a computer to identify the words that a person speaks into a microphone or telephone. Describes a group of special technologies that allow callers to speak words, phrases, or utterances that are used to control applications.

Call accounting - An information system that records and reports on telephone calls. Call accounting is used by most large companies to control expenses and allocate costs to various departments as well as by hotels, hospitals and other organizations that resell calls to its clientele.

Call center - Industry term referring to a company phone center that handles such services as help desk, customer support, lead generation, emergency response, telephone answering service, inbound response and outbound telemarketing.

Call distribution - Call center software feature that routes an inbound call to the most appropriate company representative (agent) based on the type of call.

Call Processing - The system and process that sets up the intended connection in a switching system. The system scans the trunk and/or station ports for any "requests" for service. Upon detecting a request, the system checks the stored instructions and look-up tables and sets the connection up accordingly.

Call Screening - This allows subscribers to answer their extensions, be told who is on the line (callers are asked by the system to speak their name before their call is connected), and choose to accept or reject the call.

Dispatch call - Call center feature that relays a call taken by a "dispatcher" to the most appropriate person to handle the call. Typically, a call is dispatched via pager or cell phone to a representative in the field.

Distribution List- A Distribution List contains the Mailbox Numbers of the subscribers included in the Distribution List.

Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS) - Numbers passed from the public telephone network to identify what phone number the caller dialed.

Handling time - Time a call center representative spends talking to a caller plus the time the representative spends processing the call afterwards.

Help desk - Type of call center call that involves product use and support. Common for computer hardware and software applications.

Inbound call center - Call center services that support calls received from a customer. Inbound call center calls typically include customer support and help desk calls.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) - A voice processing system that interfaces with a database to provide callers with specific information. Callers input their unique identifying data—either by pressing certain digits on the touchtone telephone or via speech recognition—and the system responds with the requested information. IVR is commonly found in businesses to direct callers to the appropriate department. Banking by telephone is an example of an IVR application

Outbound call center - Call center services that consist of calls made by a company representative out to customers. Outbound call center calls are primarily telemarketing calls.

Personal broadcast - A type of outbound call center call that consists of a pre-recorded message that is phoned out automatically to a large number of customer phone numbers stored in a database.

Predictive dialers - Outbound call center software or hardware where phone numbers in a database are automatically dialed. Once a connection is made with a person, the call center routes the call to a company representative. Predictive dialers can detect if there is no answer, if the line is busy, or if an answering machine picks up, at which time the telephone number is automatically disconnected and put back into the queue to be dialed again.

Preview Dialer - A preview dialer automatically presents the phone service agent with contact information prior to the phone system dialing the number. The agent has complete control over the dialing process and can inform the phone system if and when the call is to be placed. If the agent does not wish to proceed with the call, the phone system can present another contact for the agent to review.

Queue - In a call center, the queue is where callers are held who are not connected immediately with a live call center representative. Callers are connected with the next available person depending on where they are placed in the queue.

Service level - In the context of a call center, service level is the percentage of incoming calls that are answered live in an specified amount of time.

Voice Mail – An automated phone-messaging system. It allows a caller to leave a message for someone who is on a call or otherwise unavailable. The person being called can then retrieve and review the message at their convenience, and follow up as necessary

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) - is a technology that allows you to make voice calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular (or analog) phone line...

Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team
Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com

Call Center process

Call center is a centralized office of a company that answers incoming telephone calls from customers, and makes outgoing telephone calls to customers (telemarketing).

Diverse ranges of businesses use call centers to interact with their customers. Examples include utility companies, mail order catalogue firms, and customer support for computer hardware and software.

How call center works:

1. Incoming call center management is the art of having the right number of skilled people and supporting resources in place at the right times to handle an accurately forecasted workload, at service level and with quality.

2. Representatives management, If you have too few representatives on duty, queues get long (service level goes down), more circuits are needed, and customers get frustrated, sometimes abandoning the call. If you have too many representatives on duty, you spend too much paying for them to wait.

3. Be ready with plans for unexpected load.

4. A service level is defined as "X percent of calls answered in Y seconds", not as "X percent answered" or "Average Speed of Answer". Abandonment rates matter, too, but fixing abandonment problems usually means fixing service levels.

5. A good forecasted call load-including talk time, after-call work, and volume--is critical for budgeting people and circuits. Often, a good forecast should predict load by the half hour, using previous data, knowledge of upcoming plans, and good judgment.

6. To determine staffing needs.

7. More staff, less waiting, fewer phone lines for people on hold. Less staff, more waiting, more phone lines. Formulas exist for phone lines, too.

8. Not everyone scheduled is always working on customer service, Schedule accordingly. Be clever about work schedules to get the right number working at the right time. Service level results tell you whether you got it right.

9. Give senior managers good reports, but make sure they understand the points above.

10. There are lots of tools and graphs to measure aspects of quality. Use them to identify root causes, not beat your employees. Representatives should adhere to schedules, and do good work. Use monitoring capabilities to coach. Measuring based on "calls per hour" is unreliable, and invites cheating.

11. Customers are getting more demanding, automated systems are taking the easy calls, so representatives have to be better trained and more skilled.

12. Create a good environment that uses technology well.

Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team

Call Centers India Inc.

http://www.callcentersindia.com

Uses of Call Center Software

Call center software:

1. Predictive dialer software: A predictive dialer is used in outbound call center applications, and can be implemented in either hardware or software, but software is cheaper. A predictive dialer is used to automatically call numbers stored in the call center database; identify disconnected numbers, busy signals, unanswered calls and answering machines.

2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) software: IVR software is used in inbound call center applications, and allows you to setup an interactive set of pre-recorded menu options that a caller can select from, thus alleviating the need for live representatives to handle all incoming calls.

3. Automatic call distribution software: Automatic call center distribution software allows callers who are in a call queue to be routed to a representative efficiently. Such calls can be forwarded to the next available live person or to the most appropriate representative depending on the type and level of call as determined by the caller's IVR menu choices selected.

4. Flexible database backend: A good database is a must for any call center software system, and this is not the place to skimp. You should be able to sort the contact list by any field to maximize efficiency. The call center database should also allow one to easily import, export, and convert data between different database format from leading vendors as well.

5. Flexible reporting options: Good call center reporting software allows you to view and print call center performance metrics based on customizable date ranges, by call center agent, by service level or any other parameter. Good reporting software can make a call center manager's job much easier.

Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team
Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com

What is Call Center ?

A call center is a central place or network of places where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an enterprise. Typically, a call center has the ability to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, to screen calls and forward those to someone qualified to handle them, and to log Calls.

A call centre is often operated through an extensive open workspace, with work stations that include a computer, a Telephone set/headset connected to a telecom switch, and one or more supervisor stations. It can be independently operated or networked with additional centers, often linked to a corporate computer network, including mainframes microcomputers and LANs. Increasingly, the voice and data pathways into the centre are linked through a set of new technologies called computer telephony integration (CTI).

Call centers are not what they used to be. Innovations in technology have turned yesterday's call centers into today's contact centers.

Call centers are usually used to cut costs to the company. Many different forms of call center software are available and they all have something unique about them. Inbound call centers are used by companies to handle calls coming in, and outbound call centers are used by companies as a way to reach potential customers.

Call Centers are used by mail-order catalog organizations, telemarketing companies Computer product helps desks, and any large enterprise that uses the telephone to sell or service products and services.

Call centers provide a variety of services to organizations and customers, for example, handling orders, complaints, providing technical support to customers, the use of call centers is increasing as businesses diversify and their products and services become more complex.

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Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com/

Call Centers

A call center or call centre is a centralized office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone.

Call centers and contact centers have evolved to become the front line for customer interaction in many types of organizations. As such, they have a critical importance in the implementation of organizational strategy. Call centers have application in many industries offering customer service, as they can provide customers a single access point to diverse services. Many organizations use call centers to solicit clients or customers for new sales or donations and contributions. They can also be used to accomplish surveys of customer satisfaction or public opinion. Call centers can be divided into groups: those that focus on outgoing calling; those that focus on incoming calls, such as customer information and help areas; and those that are established to accomplish multiple tasks.

Posted by: Sales & Marketing Team
Call Centers India Inc.
http://www.callcentersindia.com