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. 

AI technology that provides real-time recommendations, knowledge, and guidance to customer service representatives during live interactions.

Artificial intelligence that can reason, make decisions, and take actions autonomously to accomplish business goals with minimal human intervention.

A customer experience model where AI Agents work alongside humans to automate customer service, assist employees, and optimize operations.

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.

An autonomous software system that can understand context, reason, use tools, and complete tasks on behalf of people or organizations.

An AI Agent that automates operational work such as quality assurance, compliance, coaching, reporting, and workforce optimization.

Automatically generated summaries of customer conversations that reduce after-call work and improve documentation.

AI-generated recommendations that help customer service representatives improve performance and customer interactions.

AI technology that continuously identifies potential regulatory or policy violations in customer interactions.

The percentage of customer interactions fully resolved by AI without requiring escalation to a human agent.

Automated scoring of customer conversations based on quality, compliance, and performance criteria.

Supporting data, citations, or conversation context that validates AI recommendations or actions.

The ability to understand how an AI system reached a recommendation or decision.

The policies, controls, and oversight used to ensure AI systems remain accurate, secure, ethical, and compliant.

Built-in rules and controls that keep AI responses accurate, safe, and aligned with business policies.

When an AI model generates information that is inaccurate, fabricated, or unsupported by facts.

The monitoring of AI models to ensure they remain accurate, reliable, performant, and compliant over time.

The coordination of AI Agents, enterprise systems, APIs, and workflows to automate end-to-end business processes.

The process an AI Agent uses to determine the sequence of actions required to accomplish a specific objective.

The ability of AI to analyze information, evaluate options, and determine the best action before responding.

A collection of specialized AI Agents working together with human employees to improve business outcomes.

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.

Artificial intelligence capable of independently completing business tasks without requiring constant human input.

The use of AI to automatically evaluate customer interactions at scale without relying solely on manual reviews.

The average amount of time required to complete a customer interaction, including talk time and after-call work.

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.

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.

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 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.

Learn what call center compliance is, key regulations like TCPA & GDPR, common risks, and best practices to stay compliant. Stay compliant & avoid penalties with Observe.AI

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 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.

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.

Redirecting customer inquiries from live agents to automated self-service channels.

An AI Agent that engages with customers through chat, messaging apps, websites, or SMS to provide automated support.

An AI Agent that supports frontline employees before, during, and after customer interactions by providing real-time guidance, automation, and coaching.

AI that analyzes customer conversations to uncover insights, trends, compliance issues, and coaching opportunities.

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.

An AI Agent that interacts directly with customers through voice, chat, messaging, or other digital channels to resolve requests and answer questions.

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 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 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. 

Numerical representations of text that enable AI systems to understand relationships between words and concepts.

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.

A customer service metric measuring how often issues are resolved during the first interaction.

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.