“Our people were adequately trained during the install. About half of our collectors had been on a dialer before. They all picked it up easily. CT Center is not technical from a collector’s point of view. Their reaction to the dialer has been good.” Steve Hall, Executive VP, Venture Financial Services, Inc.
ACD: Automatic Call Distributor. A specialized form of PBX used in call centers. Provides call queuing, different agent groups and managerial information. Often has more exchange lines than agent positions.
Agent: A member of a call center who either receives inbound or makes outbound calls or a combination of both inbound and outbound calls.
Analogue: (As in analogue phone line or analogue transmission) - where an electric signal carrying information is represented by a continuously variable voltage or amplitude - i.e. not digital.
ANI: Refers to Automatic Number Identification of the calling party. USA term for CLI.
Auto Attendant: An automated voice processing and call processing system which allows callers to automatically route themselves to a person or department within a company.
B-Channel: The 64K bit per second voice or data stream on a Basic Rate ISDN line - which can also be at 56K bits per second in the USA. The 'B' comes from 'bearer'.
Broadcast Messaging: Technology for Interactive Communication (IC) when the dialer makes automated outbound calls. Generates many inbound calls through prompted callbacks.
Busy: Term used to describe the line condition when the called party's telephone is already in use.
CallerID: A service which allows calling line identity information to be displayed on a special phone or display.
CAS: Channel Associated Signaling.
CO: Central Office - the 'public' telephone switches used by the telecoms companies to route calls.
CPE: Customer Premises Equipment.
CT Center: Computer Telephony Center -IAT's flagship CTI system for collections-based call centers. CT Center consists of Predictive Dialer and Interactive Communications (IVR) technologies, presented in an integrated hardware/software solution, used for optimizing debt collections.
CTI: Computer Telephony Integration - the linking of computer systems to telephone switches to provide advanced features such as power dialing, the automatic routing of incoming calls to an appropriate employee, or to automatically display caller's account details on an agent's terminal before the call is answered. CTI can exist with or without voice processing and is often misused to describe stand-alone voice mail or IVR systems which do not establish any data communications with the PBX.
CTR Lite: IAT's optional call recording application for the CT Center Predictive Dialer and IC solution.
CT Impact: Computer Telephony Impact - IAT's hosted IVR or interactive broadcast messaging service. Data from collections accounts are uploaded to a hosted (virtual) server, which makes automated outbound calls.
D-Channel: The 64K bit per second data / signaling stream on a Primary Rate ISDN line. The 'D' comes from 'data'.
DID: Direct Inward Dialing. The presentation of the last 2, 3 or 4 digits of a dialed telephone number to a PBX to switch the call to the relevant employee.
Digital: (As in digital phone line or digital transmission) - Where the signal carrying the (voice) information is represented by a set of finite numerical samples - i.e. not analogue. See also PCM.
DNIS: Dialed Number Identification Service - Similar to DDI but returning the whole dialed number rather than the last few digits.
DTMF: Dual Tone Multi Frequency - the technical term for the tones generated by a touch-tone telephone, named such because each button on the telephone is represented by two simultaneous tones, one of a high frequency and one of a low frequency. There are four different high tones and four low tones giving 16 unique combinations in total. Usually only 12 of these are used (0 to 9, * and #), but 4 additional codes, named A, B, C and D, are also available.
E-1: A digital signaling protocol used in Europe and Asia. E-1 operates at 2.048 M bits per second and provides thirty 64K bits per second data channels and two 64 K bits per second signaling channels. Similar to T-1 used in the USA.
Flash-hook: A common method of signaling a recall to a PBX. Consists of breaking the loop current for about 500ms and reconnecting it.
Glare: The condition when a voice processing system goes off-hook to place an outbound call, but inadvertently connects to an incoming call which arrived momentarily beforehand - i.e. before ringing was detected.
Hosted: Data from collections accounts are uploaded to a hosted (virtual) server, which makes automated outbound calls. IAT's hosted service is called CT Impact (Computer Telephony Impact).
IC: Interactive Communications - The product name of IAT's interactive messaging (IVR) modules. The IC Inbound and IC Outbound modules are available as optional features of CT Center, IAT's flagship CTI system for collections-based call centers.
Inband: (As in inband signaling) Used to describe the transmission of additional data concerning a telephone call (such as the called party identity), within the signaling bandwidth of the voice channel. An example of inband signaling is where a PBX sends information as DTMF tones.
ISDN: Integrated Services Digital Network - An international standard for voice and data communications where the transmission medium is digital from caller to called party.
IVR: Interactive Voice Response system - a system which allows a caller to access computer based information and possible to change that data or initiate requests. The most widely known IVR application is telephone banking.
LAN: Local Area Network. Used to link computers together, within an office or building.
Loop: An electrical 'loop' is made when an analogue telephone's handset is lifted. This allows 'loop' current to flow from the telephone exchange.
MF: Multi-frequency - a signaling system used to communicate between telephone exchanges and across digital lines to certain customer premises equipment (such as R2 digital systems). Note this is not the same as DTMF or touch tone.
MVIP: Multi Vendor Integration Protocol. A digital bus used to carry voice and fax information between voice and fax processing components from different suppliers within a PC. Supports up to 256 individual voice channels.
ODC: Open Database Connectivity. A widely supported standard to provide a common programming interface to databases from different suppliers.
Off-hook: The state a telephone is in when its handset is lifted.
On-hook: The state a telephone is in when is handset is not lifted.
PABX: Private Automatic Branch Exchange - now more commonly referred to as just PBX (see below).
PBX: Private Branch Exchange - the telephone switching system used within individual companies.
PC: Personal Computer - A computer which conforms to the hardware and software model developed by IBM in the 1980's, and is now widely used as an open platform for developing voice and fax processing systems.
PCM: Pulse Code Modulation - a method of representing an analogue signal digitally. This is achieved by sampling the amplitude of the analogue signal at regular intervals and representing each sample by a digital value. The maximum frequency which can be represented in this manner is half the frequency of the sampling frequency.
POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service - used to refer to basic analogue telephone connections with no advanced features.
Power Dialer: An automated system which makes outbound calls for a call center agent - see also predictive dialer and preview dialer.
Predictive Dialer: An automatic system which places outbound calls and uses statistical modeling to start dialing the next call before an agent is free to handle it, on the grounds that by the time the call has been answered an agent should be available.
Preview Dialer: An automated system which shows the details of the next person to be called on an agent's screen. The agent can then allow the preview dialer to automatically place the call, or can skip these details and view the next contact's details.
PRI: Primary Rate Interface. A term used to describe an ISDN connection based on E-1 or T-1 trunks. Provides 23 64K bits per second voice or data streams on T-1 (USA) circuits.
PSTN: The Public Switched Telephone Network.
Q931: An ISDN signaling system - as used with EuroISDN.
Queuing: The ability of an ACD or voice processing system to form a 'queue' of incoming callers destined for an agent or agent group.
Recall: A 'request' sent to a PBX to put the call on hold and accept further commands. Most commonly used to transfer a call from one extension to another. Can be either an earth recall, flash-hook, or timed break recall.
RJ11: Standard US telephone connector.
RJ45: Telephone connector similar to RJ11, but which handles two telephone devices.
Robbed-bit signaling: A method used on T-1 lines to carry signaling information. As there is no spare bandwidth to carry signaling information as well as voice data, every 6th sample of voice data contains just 7 bits of voice data and 1 bit of signaling information.
Routing: Technology that uses algorithms to direct inbound calls to the right agents based on skills and abilities.
Service Provider: The individual or company operating the voice or fax processing equipment connected to premium rate lines. The service provider receives a percentage of the telephone call cost from the telecoms company and in turn pays the information provider their fee. Of course, the service provider and the information provider can be the same person or company.
SIT: Special Information Tone - a series of tones generated by telecoms companies prior to issuing a voiced announcement. Used to enable automated equipment to interpret the announcement.
Skills-Based Routing: The process of redirecting calls to desired agents based on skills or training criteria. Inbound call account information is paired with agent skill levels to allow calls to reach the most qualified agents or teams. This is a common practice in larger call centers with various agents and account types.
SQL: Structured Query Language - a standard method of accessing database information though an 'English-like' expression which follows a strict format.
SS7: Signaling System Number 7 - also known as CCITT No. 7 - A digital signaling protocol most frequently used for communication between telephone exchanges.
Station: A telephone device.
Switch: General term to mean an ACD, PBX or telephone exchange.
T-1: T-1 lines operate at 1.544 M bits per second and carry a maximum of 24 voice calls. Robbed-bit signaling is used.
TAPI: Telephony Application Programming Interface. A Microsoft / Intel initiative to provide a common interface for developing telephony applications from the desktop. TAPI allows developers of call and voice processing systems to write code which is hardware independent - allowing applications to work equally well with a TAPI compliant voice / fax modem, voice processing card or PBX driver software. TAPI allows implementation of 1st party CTI.
TCP/IP: Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. A data protocol for transmitting information between computer systems and across the Internet.
Text-to-Speech: The synthetic generation of voice constructed from pure text input. Text to Speech techniques are used where an IVR system has to speak out information which cannot be pre-recorded (such as speaking out e-mails) or where the data to be spoken would be impractical to have pre-recorded (such as rapidly changing product names, or vast customer databases). The quality of text to speech synthesis is improving, but should only be used when pre-recorded speech cannot, due to its robotic sound and poorer intelligibility than pre-recorded speech.
Touch tone: A non technical term used to describe DTMF.
Trunk: Used to mean a T-1 digital connection. Also referred to as a pipe or span.
TTS: See Text-to-Speech