Business Communications Glossary

Telephony

Computer Telephony Integration — CTI

Computer telephony integration (CTI) is technology that connects a phone system to business software, so calls can be placed, answered and logged from within an application such as a CRM rather than on a handset.

UCaaS — Unified Communications as a Service

UCaaS (unified communications as a service) is a cloud-delivered platform that combines business calling, messaging, video meetings and file sharing into one system, replacing separate on-premise tools.

SIP Trunk

A SIP trunk is a virtual connection that carries phone calls between a business phone system and the public telephone network over an internet connection, replacing physical ISDN or analogue lines.

PBX — Private Branch Exchange

A PBX (private branch exchange) is the system that routes calls inside an organisation and connects it to the outside telephone network, so staff share a set of external lines rather than each having their own.

Softphone

A softphone is software that turns a computer or mobile device into a business phone, placing and receiving calls over the internet without dedicated desk hardware.

Contact centre

IVR — Interactive Voice Response

An IVR (interactive voice response) is an automated phone menu that answers an inbound call, collects a keypress or spoken response from the caller, and routes the call accordingly.

CCaaS — Contact Center as a Service

CCaaS (contact center as a service) is cloud contact centre software that handles queueing, skills-based routing, agent management and reporting across voice and digital channels.

ACD — Automatic Call Distribution

ACD (automatic call distribution) is the system that decides which agent receives an incoming call, distributing calls across a team by rules such as skill, availability or longest idle time.

Predictive Dialer

A predictive dialer places outbound calls automatically, dialling several numbers at once and connecting answered calls to available agents, so agents spend less time waiting on unanswered calls.

WFM — Workforce Management

WFM (workforce management) is the practice and software of forecasting contact volume, scheduling enough agents to meet it, and tracking adherence to that schedule.

Numbering

DID — Direct Inward Dialing

A DID (direct inward dialing) number is an external phone number that rings one specific person or team directly, without the caller going through a switchboard or menu.

Country Calling Code

A country calling code is the prefix dialled before a national phone number to reach another country — +1 for the United States and Canada, +44 for the United Kingdom, +971 for the UAE.

E.164

E.164 is the ITU standard that defines international phone number format: a leading plus sign, a country calling code, and the national number, up to fifteen digits in total.

Quality

ASR — Answer Seizure Ratio

ASR (answer seizure ratio) is the percentage of call attempts on a route that are answered, used in wholesale voice as the headline measure of whether a route actually connects calls.

Jitter

Jitter is variation in the arrival time of voice packets. It is the most common cause of choppy or robotic VoIP audio, and it is a separate problem from insufficient bandwidth.

STIR/SHAKEN

STIR/SHAKEN is a US framework that cryptographically signs caller ID so receiving carriers can verify a call genuinely originated from the number it displays, used to combat caller ID spoofing.

Speech Analytics

Speech analytics is software that transcribes recorded calls and analyses the text for keywords, topics, sentiment and compliance phrases, making call content searchable rather than listenable.