Learning to Speak Contact Center-ese

While getting familiar with the contact center industry, one of the most challenging things is familiarizing yourself with all the terminology and acronyms. In hunting around I found a call center “dictionary” of sorts which you can find here. I thought it might also be useful to briefly summarize some of the key terms which you might encounter and explain how they could impact you if you were selecting an outsourcer.

Talk Time – This includes the total time spent on a call when an agent is talking to a contact. It’s the time from when the phone is answered and the agent says “hello” right to when the caller hangs up.

Wrap Time – This is the time at the conclusion of the call when the agent is still working on something to assist the contact, however the actual call itself is over. This might include data entry, etc.

HT – This is an acronym for “Handle Time”. Basically this includes the entire length of time required for dealing with one customer contact. The HT includes the talk time of the call plus the wrap time.

AHT - You might also hear AHT which stands for “Average Handle Time”. You can get this by taking the total of all the HT’s for a particular group of calls divided by the number of calls in that group to get the average.

When shopping for an outsource contact center AHT can have a strong influence on the price. Most outsourcers charge a price per agent minute or per agent hour. While a potential service provider that offers a cheaper rate per minute might seem like the obvious choice, shaving a few seconds off the AHT – for example a shorter wrap time – can result in significant savings when multiplied times your total number of calls.

When you’re shopping around, ask what techniques each center has for reducing the AHT.  If they don’t know what an AHT is, refer them to this blog (and choose a different provider).

Comments

[Vaibhav]

Dear Jeff Fettes,

I am impressed to see your blog and it is well organized. I am sharing few more jargons of call center which will be more helpful to understand and make the things easy while working at call center.
Kindly read this small list:

Automatic Call Distributor (ACD)
Average Speed Of Answer (ASA)
B2B (Business to Business)
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
Calling Line Identity (CLI or CLID)
CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
Digital Access Signaling System (DASS 2)
IP: See Internet Protocol
Local Area Network:LAN
ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced 'askey', this is used to describe the binary code for text.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
Session Initiated Protocol (SIP)

I hope it will be helpful for all of us.

Vaibhav Pandey
http://www.vcarecallcenter.com
India’s one and only end to end CISCO based IP network.

[Shayan Sanyal]

I would make a minor correction for the context of this blog. Even though Vaibhav is correct in that CSR stands for Corporate Social Responsibility, it would probably be more appropriate to refer to the other expansion of this acronym: Customer Service Representative.

Also:

FCR = First Call Resolution
TCV = Total Call Volume
IVR = Interactive Voice Response
CTI = Computer Telephony Integration
LTV = (Customer) Life Time Value