Business communications glossary.
Terms
The terms that come up when you shop for telephony, contact center and APIs, explained in one sentence with a link to where they are used.
- 10DLC
- Registration required in the United States to send business SMS from 10-digit local numbers. Learn more →
- API
- An interface that lets your system ask another system to do something, such as send an SMS or originate a call. Learn more →
- Call queue (ACD)
- The line where calls wait until an agent is free, with distribution and priority rules. Learn more →
- CCaaS
- Contact Center as a Service: the cloud platform to serve customers with queues, agents, tickets and reports. Learn more →
- Click-to-dial
- Calling with one click from a system: the agent extension rings first and, on answer, the customer is dialed. Learn more →
- CPaaS
- Communications Platform as a Service: APIs to add SMS, WhatsApp, calls or verification to your own applications. Learn more →
- CRM
- A system to record customers, deals, tasks and the history of every contact with the company. Learn more →
- CSAT
- Customer satisfaction score: a one-question survey at the end of an interaction, expressed as the share of satisfied customers. Learn more →
- DID
- A direct phone number assigned to an extension, a queue or a menu. Learn more →
- Help Desk
- A system that turns every customer request into a ticket with a number, owner, priority and deadline. Learn more →
- IP phone system (PBX)
- The system that manages a company's extensions, menus and call routing, usually in the cloud today. Learn more →
- IVR
- An interactive voice menu that answers the call and routes it based on the option the caller chooses. Learn more →
- NOC
- Network Operations Center: the team and tools that watch critical services and respond to incidents. Learn more →
- Number porting
- Moving a number to another provider without changing it. At TelHarbor it is available for United States numbers. Learn more →
- Omnichannel
- Serving customers across several channels (voice, WhatsApp, SMS and email) with a single history per customer. Learn more →
- Operator panel
- A live console that shows extensions, queues and calls, and lets you transfer, pick up or supervise with one click. Learn more →
- OTP
- A one-time code sent by SMS or WhatsApp to verify that a person controls that number. Learn more →
- Presence
- A person's status (available, in a meeting, do not disturb) visible to the rest of the team. Learn more →
- SIP Trunk
- A trunk that connects a phone system to the public network over the internet instead of physical lines. Learn more →
- SLA
- Service level agreement: the committed time to respond to or resolve a request. Learn more →
- Softphone
- An app that turns a computer or mobile phone into a phone extension. Learn more →
- Ticket
- A record of a request with its conversation, status, priority, owner and times. Learn more →
- Toll-free
- A number that is free for the caller; the company pays for the call. Learn more →
- UCaaS
- Unified Communications as a Service: telephony, messaging, video and collaboration on one cloud platform. Learn more →
- VPN
- An encrypted tunnel that protects the connection between the user's device and the platform. Learn more →
- Wallboard
- A live board with calls waiting, connected agents and the service level of a call center. Learn more →
- Webhook
- A notification one system sends automatically to another when an event happens, such as an inbound message. Learn more →
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