REFERENCE

Business Communications Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the telephony and contact centre terms that come up when buying or running a phone system. Free to cite.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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