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Contact Center Industry Terms as Defined by an Oracle Certified Partner

If you are a newcomer to the contact center industry, you may have heard of Promero and the key product they are marketing called the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution. But as a newcomer to this fusion of IT and call center functions, you need to know a little bit more about the terms industry mainstays seem to take for granted because they use them daily.

When an agent is busy with so many calls from customers (called inbound or incoming calls), this may leave some customers frustrated because they cannot reach the agent fast enough to suit their needs. This results in the so-called Abandoned Call or Lost Call (meaning simply the customer opted to hang up than wait around.)

The agent is also referred to by other names, like specialist, attendant, staff member, customer service professional, team member, account executive, technician, operator, engineer, consultant, associate, rep, telephone sales representative, service representative, and customer service representative. They all refer to the contact center agent or call center agent who is responsible either for accepting incoming calls; or for making outgoing or telemarketing calls (also dubbed the Outbound calls.)

The worst thing that can happen to a call center is if it has an All Trunks Busy situation, wherein every one of the trunks in their system or network is clogged with calls. This means that inevitably some callers will encounter busy signals when they try to make incoming calls to the call center. And when callers encounter busy signals consistently, the frequency of Abandoned Calls or Lost Calls will go up as well since customers will not hang around to wait for the trunk or the line to clear so their call will be patched through.

This is where Average Time to Abandonment comes in – this term refers to how long on average your caller will stay waiting in queue before choosing to abandon the call altogether. In an ideal call center solution, Average Time to Abandonment will be rather high which means that the caller will agree to wait a longer period of time until an agent picks up the call to address the concern. But in reality, many call centers experience short Average Time to Abandonment, meaning clients will call, wait a short time then hang up. A short Average Time to Abandonment will mean more Lost Calls representing Los Business.

Any of the call center software packages you might choose from will all have a specific Architecture. Architecture simply means the basic design or way by which the software was created so that its different components can work together in cohesion. A good call center solution architecture would be one that can factor in the aspects of system capacity, the ability to upgrade the system, and capacity for integration with other systems as well.

One virtual call center solution you may want to try out for your call center system is the Oracle Contact Center Anywhere call center solution.