A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone. An inbound call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product or service support or information enquiries from consumers. Outbound call centres are operated for telemarketing, for solicitation of charitable or political donations, debt collection, market research, emergency notifications, and urgent/critical needs blood banks. A contact centre, further extension to call centres administers centralised handling of individual communications, including letters, faxes, live support software, social media, instant message, and e-mail.
The erlang is a dimensionless unit that is used in telephony as a measure of offered load or carried load on service-providing elements such as telephone circuits or telephone switching equipment. A single cord circuit has the capacity to be used for 60 minutes in one hour. Full utilization of that capacity, 60 minutes of traffic, constitutes 1 erlang.
An automated call distribution system, commonly known as automatic call distributor (ACD), is a telephony device that answers and distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals or agents within an organization. ACDs often use a voice menu to direct callers based on the customer's selection, telephone number, selected incoming line to the system or time of day the call was processed. Computer telephony integration (CTI) and computer-supported telecommunications applications (CSTA) are intermediate software that can produce advanced ACD systems. Experts claim that "the invention of ACD technology made the concept of a call centre possible."
Circuit switching is a method of implementing a telecommunications network in which two network nodes establish a dedicated communications channel (circuit) through the network before the nodes may communicate. The circuit guarantees the full bandwidth of the channel and remains connected for the duration of the communication session. The circuit functions as if the nodes were physically connected as with an electrical circuit. Circuit switching contrasts with message switching and packet switching.
Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) is a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control Extension (OCX), a way to develop and use custom user interface elements. On a technical level, an OLE object is any object that implements the IOleObject interface, possibly along with a wide range of other interfaces, depending on the object's needs.
Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via a keypad. In telecommunications, IVR allows customers to interact with a company’s host system via a telephone keypad or by speech recognition, after which services can be inquired about through the IVR dialogue. IVR systems can respond with pre-recorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed. IVR systems deployed in the network are sized to handle large call volumes and also used for outbound calling as IVR systems are more intelligent than many predictive dialer systems.
Queue areas are places in which people queue for goods or services. Such a group of people is known as a queue or line, and the people are said to be waiting or standing in a queue or in line, respectively. Occasionally, both the British and American terms are combined to form the term "queue line".
In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two main principal operations:
In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components typically used for inter-process communication (IPC), or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for messaging – the passing of control or of content. Group communication systems provide similar kinds of functionality.
Telecommunications traffic engineering, teletraffic engineering, or traffic engineering is the application of traffic engineering theory to telecommunications. Teletraffic engineers use their knowledge of statistics including queuing theory, the nature of traffic, their practical models, their measurements and simulations to make predictions and to plan telecommunication networks such as a telephone network or the Internet. These tools and knowledge help provide reliable service at lower cost.
Music on hold (MOH) is the business practice of playing recorded music to fill the silence that would be heard by telephone callers who have been placed on hold. It is especially common in situations involving customer service.
A call transfer is a telecommunications mechanism that enables a user to relocate an existing telephone call to another phone or attendant console, using a transfer button or a switchhook flash and dialing the required location. The transferred call is either announced or unannounced.
In a multitasking computer system, processes may occupy a variety of states. These distinct states may not be recognized as such by the operating system kernel. However, they are a useful abstraction for the understanding of processes.
Virtual queuing is a concept used in inbound call centers. Call centers use an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) to distribute incoming calls to specific resources (agents) in the center. ACDs hold queued calls in First In, First Out order until agents become available. From the caller’s perspective, without virtual queuing they have only two choices: wait until an agent resource becomes available, or abandon and try again later. From the call center’s perspective, a long queue results in many abandoned calls, repeat attempts, and customer dissatisfaction.
Telemarketing fraud is fraudulent selling conducted over the telephone. The term is also used for telephone fraud not involving selling.
Joins is an asynchronous concurrent computing API (Join-pattern) from Microsoft Research for the .NET Framework. It is based on join calculus and makes the concurrency constructs of the Cω language available as a CLI assembly that any CLI compliant language can use.
The Brain Fuck Scheduler (BFS) is a process scheduler designed for the Linux kernel in August 2009 as an alternative to the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) and the O(1) scheduler. BFS was created by veteran kernel programmer Con Kolivas.
Call management is the process of designing and implementing inbound telephone call parameters, which govern the routing of these calls through a network. The process is most prominently utilized by corporations and the call centre industry and has its highest effectiveness when call logging software tools are used. Calls are routed according to the set up of calling features within the given system such as Call queues, IVR menus, Hunt groups and Recorded announcements. Call features provide a customised experience for the caller and maximize the efficiency of inbound call handling. Call management parameters can specify how calls are distributed according to an operator's skill level in relation to a call, the time and/or date of a call, the location of the caller or through automatic routing processes.
VirtualPBX is a privately held communications service provider offering PBX technology to manage phone tasks within offices and departments.
A network scheduler, also called packet scheduler, queueing discipline, qdisc or queueing algorithm, is an arbiter on a node in packet switching communication network. It manages the sequence of network packets in the transmit and receive queues of the network interface controller. There are several network schedulers available for the different operating systems, that implement many of the existing network scheduling algorithms.
