glossary

ADSL – Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line
A broadband technology that delivers high data transfer speeds over existing phone lines.

Analogue Lines
This was the original, and still is the common telephone line for many small systems, however some of today’s modern telephony systems are moving from traditional analogue to more cost effective digital alternatives such as ISDN. If you rent 3 analogue lines then 3 members of your company can speak to 3 separate outside destinations all at the same time. If you have 3 analogue lines, yet only require 1 telephone number for your company, then you request 1 line and 2 auxiliary lines. Analogue lines need to be allowed for fax machines and alarms.

Analogue Phones
Analogue phones are basic telephone system phones that allow calls to be placed and received by routing them through the public switched network.

ATM – Asynchronous Transfer Mode
A transmission and switching technique capable of supporting voice, video and data (Multimedia) communications. It is unique in that each piece of information is addressed and is of the same length, allowing for very high-speed communications.

Automated Attendant
An auto-attendant is the recorded message that answers your phones and instructs callers how to reach the person or department they are looking for. The caller uses their telephone keypad to choose who they need to speak to. Automated Attendant can prove to be beneficial if your company receives a high volume of inbound calls as it can reduce disruptions to your staff carrying out their duties.

Automated Call Distribution
Automated Call Distribution (ACD) enables you to quickly and cost-effectively introduce a range of sophisticated call management techniques that will allow you to prioritise calls so that existing or high value customers are placed at the head of the queue, identify types of call and direct them to the most appropriately skilled agent, set up intelligent announcements to advise callers of their place in the queue and the estimated time to answer. ACD is a popular software solution for call centre environments as it provides statistics that can be incorporated into intelligent management reports.

Bandwidth
How much you can send through a connection. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits per second; a full page of English text is roughly 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 57,000 bits per second whereas full-motion, full screen video would require some 10,000,000 bits per second, depending on compression.

Call Forwarding
A feature of telephone systems which allows incoming calls to be diverted automatically to a different number, for example a mobile phone or a home office.

Call Management
Call Management is a software client/server application that links to your telephone system and collects real-time call data such as, number of calls waiting, number of available agents, number of abandoned calls, time of oldest call waiting, speed of answer and average talk time.