Contact Center Glossary

Learn about what After Call Work (ACW) means in the call center, why it is important, ACW industry standards, and what call center leaders can do to improve it.

Agent analytics is the process of tracking agent performance in a contact center using a variety of tools employed across multiple support channels. 

Agent performance is a broad analysis of how agents are performing on a wide variety of monitorable call center metrics and KPIs.

Agent turnover rate is defined as the percentage of contact center employees leaving an organization each year. Contact centers see a higher agent turnover rate than any other industry and bringing this metric down has been a constant challenge.

Discover how call arrival rate affects your contact center's performance. Learn to calculate and optimize arrival rates to enhance efficiency.

Automated Quality Management, or AQM, is an integrated component to automate the entire quality management(QM) process of a contact center.

What does Average Speed of Answer (ASA) mean for your contact center? Learn how to calculate ASA, benchmark industry standards, and improve scores.

The process of assigning certain business functions to a party outside the company. While customer service is the most commonly outsourced process, companies also outsource accounting, IT services, and human resource management among others.

CSAT stands for Customer SATisfaction and is a parameter used to denote how satisfied a customer is with a service, product, or experience. It is different from Net Promoter Score (NPS); a CSAT score is strictly a measurement of customer happiness, while NPS is the measurement of customer loyalty to a brand.

Call Calibration in Call Centers—learn how to ensure consistent agent performance, enhance customer experience, and boost your contact center's efficiency

A call center evaluation form is a pre-made template for evaluating a call, where a QA analyst fills out a form and scores how the agent performed.

For a contact center, call abandonment rate refers to the percentage of inbound phone calls that are abandoned by the customer before speaking to an agent.

A call center audit is a periodical assessment of established processes, workflows, procedures, and guidelines that agents need to follow in a contact center.

Call center coaching is a great way for agents to learn new skills, receive constructive feedback, and improve performance. Coaching programs can also be automated to highlight an agent’s weaknesses and customize the 1:1 sessions accordingly.

Call center compliance is the strict adherence of the rules set by a regulatory body or an organization itself. 

Call center efficiency is the technical implementation of the annual targets to support customers. Eliminating inefficiencies and improving overall performance are the ultimate objectives for any contact center and proper steps can be taken to reach it.

A call center monitoring form is a system designed to evaluate agents on how effectively they can handle any customer interaction based on pre-established criteria. 

Discover what a call center staffing model is and how to effectively manage staffing based on call volumes and hold times. Improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Customer sentiment analysis is an AI-powered service that gauges the perceived emotion of the customer to determine their opinion towards a product, topic, or event.

Customer engagement is the connection between a customer and a company via multiple channels. It is the different ways in which a company creates a lasting relationship with its consumers, pushing for brand loyalty by always being readily and easily accessible.

Customer experience is the perception and relationship that a customer has with a contact center, based on the sum total of all their interactions. It is critical deciding factor for whether a customer returns to a company or chooses a competitor.‍

Customer sentiment is the information on a customer’s attitude, emotion, and opinions about a brand, product line, marketing campaign, or any other aspects. A thorough sentiment analysis of a customer can provide invaluable insights on how to improve customer satisfaction.

Customer verification is a process used by contact centers to authenticate the customer’s information and validate their identity. 

Data monitoring is the process of proactively reviewing and evaluating important business data to ensure quality and ascertain adherence to established standards and protocols.

Dead air is defined as the period of silence during a contact center interaction when neither the customer nor the agent is interacting. 

An experience map, also known as a Customer Journey map (CJM), is the path a customer takes while interacting with a business. It highlights all the customer touch points before a customer converts or takes action.

Learn the meaning of FRT and how First Response Time (FRT) impacts customer satisfaction. Discover strategies to measure and reduce FRT effectively with Observe.AI.

Learn what call escalations are and get expert tips to handle them effectively, improve customer experience, and streamline your contact center operations.