Glossary

From BPO to AHT to phygital (physical + digital!), outsourcing has its own lexicon. Check out our glossary to learn about the terms we use, and what they mean.

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Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human cognition, like visual perception, speech and face recognition, translating, decision-making and problem-solving, by computer systems. Through learning and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, computers are trained or "taught" to perform designated tasks by processing large amounts of data and find structures and [...]

Average handle time (AHT)

Average handle time (AHT) refers to the total amount of time every contact centre agent spends in conversation with each customer - including hold time and time spent completing forms or other tasks as a result of the conversation, as well as the length of the conversation itself - is [...]

Back office

The back office refers to all business functions and departments within an organisation that unlike say sales or marketing, are not customer facing. Therefore, everything from IT and accounting to logistics, procurement, supply chain management, HR and administration can be considered part of the back office. As data processing and [...]

Big data

Big data refers to new ways and approaches to dealing with, processing and gaining insights from data sets that are now too big for existing applications and technologies to handle. The term is also used to describe the situation modern organisations are facing. They have never had such an abundance [...]

Business process outsourcing (BPO)

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a business practice that involves contracting of the operations and responsibilities of a specific business to a third-party service provider. At Sitel Group, we go beyond the traditional Business Process Outsourcing model to support every stage of your customer's journey by pairing innovative technology with [...]

Call centre

The call centre, which traditionally served as the physical hub for responding to telephone calls from customers requiring help, assistance or information, is a core component of any customer experience management strategy. Over recent decades the call centre has morphed into the modern contact centre which today handles a host [...]

Chatbot

A chatbot is a software application that runs an automated task – usually over the internet. Therefore, in its most basic form, a bot is a computer program that, without human intervention, is capable of automating a narrow written conversation with a person within a social messaging application, a smartphone [...]

Community management

Community management is the practice of developing a brand's online community, managing the engagement and activity with its audience to create a network in which they can connect and share. A brand's "community" consists of customers, target audience and all the people who interact with the brand online. Community management [...]

Customer effort score (CES)

A Customer Effort Score (CES) survey is used to gauge how easy or difficult it is for a customer to interact with a business along the path to purchase, for instance, or with one of its products or services. Measured using a single-question with a five- or seven-point scale ranging [...]

Customer experience

Customer Experience, usually abbreviated to CX, is a customer’s perception of and feelings towards a brand as they navigate the customer journey. As CX is cumulative, every touch point and every interaction, whether it’s with a product, a website or an agent working in a contact center carries equal weight [...]

Customer journey

The customer journey is the path a person follows from being unaware of an organization to becoming first a customer and eventually an advocate of its products and services. In other words, it's every interaction an individual has with a brand leading up to an initial purchase and crucially every [...]

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a way of seeing every interaction a customer has with your company and understanding if that interaction makes things easier or harder to complete a step on the path to purchase. Usually created in a simple-to-follow visual format, customer journey maps cover every touch point a [...]

Customer lifecycle management

Customer lifecycle management is the act of measuring how effective your organization is at moving the customer from touch point to touch point along the customer journey. In practice, customer lifecycle management means looking at the different stages of the customer journey, from awareness through to purchasing and advocacy, identifying [...]

Customer relationship management platform

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is a tool that companies use to track customer data and interactions. A CRM platform uses data analysis to give visibility into a company's interaction with current and potential customers, providing deep insights on each customer's journey. CRM software aims to help brands build better [...]

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

A Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) survey is the simplest way of gauging what your customers think about any interaction, across any channel, they have with your organization. Whether it’s speaking to a customer service representative at the contact centre, navigating the website or using an app, a CSAT survey asks [...]

Customer service agent

A customer service agent, or a customer service representative, is the individual who supports a brand's customers via phone, chat, email, messaging, social or other channels. To provide the best experience, customer service agents require specialized skills and qualities including, empathy, efficiency and the ability to remain calm under pressure. [...]

Disruptor

If a company is considered a disruptor or as being disruptive, it has found an innovative way of doing business in an existing sector or is creating a new market and in the process, is shaking up the status quo. Many organisations have been described as disruptive, but the label [...]

Dragon

According to entrepreneur, analyst, public speaker and best-selling author Daniel Newman, a dragon is a company that, thanks to its agility is able to adapt, innovate and thrive even in the face of disruption. Unlike unicorns, dragons are established companies that through digital transformation rediscover their startup mentality and commit [...]

First contact resolution

First call or first contact resolution (FCR) is a contact center’s ability to solve a customer’s problem at the first time of asking – ie without that customer having to make a follow up call or move to another channel. Although there is a growing number of digital channels open [...]

GDPR

The GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is a legal framework that harmonizes the rules surrounding how European residents’ data is collected, stored or processed. It applies to any organisation anywhere in the world that conducts business within the European Union (EU) and became law on May 25, 2018. Regardless [...]

Interactive voice response (IVR)

Working via telephone keypad inputs or a customer’s vocal commands, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is a technology used in contact centers for understanding why a customer is calling and in some situations for helping them to solve their own problem rather than wait on hold. For example, when phoning the [...]

Internet of things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network created by connecting potentially any electronic device, from motion sensors to coffee machines to the internet and to each other. The growing popularity of connected devices, particularly as part of the smart home, is already removing friction from the customer journey within [...]

Key performance indicator (KPI)

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a well-defined and quantifiable way of understanding how close an individual, a department or an entire organisation is to achieving a stated goal. Potentially any metric within business can be used as a KPI – for example, how much profit the organisation is making [...]

Knowledge base

A knowledge base is a self-service repository or library of information used to store retrievable information about a product, service or topic. Simply put, it's a collection of your company's internal or external knowledge that end-users can quickly search to retrieve answers and specific information. For example, a knowledge base [...]

Learning management system

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a digital platform built for delivering education or training in a scholastic or corporate environment. An LMS supports all content types, but unlike a MOOC, these multimedia materials are usually bespoke, created by learning professionals for a specific client’s use and as such will [...]

Massive open online course (MOOC)

A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a web-based education or training portal. As well as being simple to access- it’s open to anyone anywhere with an internet connection – MOOCs are innovative because they blend traditional text-based classroom materials with a host of multimedia content drawn from the web. [...]

Moment of truth

Generally speaking, a moment of truth is any interaction a customer has with a brand where that customer forms or changes their opinion. However, within customer experience management and in particular across Sitel Group’s global network of contact centres, we define the moment of truth as an instance where the [...]

Nearshore outsourcing

To Nearshore is to outsource one or more of a client organisation’s activities, processes or services to another country, usually within the same continent and with the same or a very similar time zone. For example a North American company could move some of its operations to Mexico or Panama [...]

Net promoter score (NPS)

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a measure of how likely or unlikely a customer is to recommend your organisation. It’s issued as a single question survey asking the customer to rate, on a scale of 0-10, how likely he or she is to recommend your organisation to someone they [...]

NPS survey

NPS surveys are used to generate NPS scores, the measure of how likely or unlikely customers are to recommend your organisation with a score from 0-10. In terms of how they function, customers responding with a score from 0-to-six are brand detractors and are likely to actively dissuade people they [...]

Offshore outsourcing

In the world of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) to offshore means to move one or more of a client organisation’s business activities or processes to another country. There are a number of benefits to offshoring including being able to access a wider and more diverse labor pool, being able to [...]

Omnichannel

Omnichannel means all channels of communication working together to provide a consistent, unified customer experience. It’s an approach to customer interaction that recognizes customers move from channel to channel – for instance from social media to live chat and then to the phone - on the path to purchase; and [...]

Online community

An online community is a group of users who interact virtually to share knowledge, have discussions and communicate with others over a common interest. When it comes to customer support, an online community offers customers and users a way to self-serve and share best practices, in turn, giving brands valuable [...]

Onshore outsourcing

Onshore outsourcing is when an organisation moves one or more of its services or processes to another company whose premises are based in the same country. By partnering with a leading Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) provider whether onshore, nearshore or offshore, a company is gaining access to expertise, infrastructure and [...]

PCI Compliance

If you accept, process, store or transmit credit, debit or prepaid card information, you must be Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant. PCI compliance means meeting and constantly maintaining and monitoring a set of six security objectives agreed and enforced by the Payment Card Industry Standards Council [...]

Phygital retail

Phygital is the term coined to describe the emerging approach to retail that’s geared to meeting or surpassing customers’ expectations in terms of practicality and emotion. A blend of physical and digital, phygital retail is taking the best elements of ecommerce and combining them with the unique aspects of browsing [...]

Robotic process automation (RPA)

RPA, or Robotic Process Automation is using a piece of trained software or ‘bot’ to perform a high-volume, repetitive digital task that would otherwise need to be performed by a human. Tasks can range from data entry and file validation to generating reports and invoices or moving and reformatting information [...]

Self-service portal

A self-service portal is hosted on a website and is designed to enable customers to complete a number of tasks themselves; rather than reach out to a contact centre. The tasks in question can range from the simple - resetting a password, checking order status or updating personal information; to [...]

Service level agreement

A key element of an outsourcing agreement, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) defines what is being undertaken and the required levels of performance. As well as a clear description of the services, the SLA will state what metrics will be tracked and how often in order to measure and report [...]

Speech analytics

Speech analytics is turning calls made into a contact centre into actionable data which can provide a host of insights. These can range from understanding common contact drivers, customer feeling towards a brand, the overall quality of service being delivered, the performance of individual agents, potential gaps in agent training [...]

Structured data

If data is structured, it is in a format that is simple to process, digest, search or analyze. Therefore, any file contained in a relational database is structured data, as is anything entered into an excel sheet – its predefined fields mean that all data is entered in a specific [...]

Ticketing system

A ticketing system is the most effective means of tracking a customer’s issue and ensuring it is properly resolved. When a customer calls a contact centrewith a problem, the agent he or she speaks to creates a digital ticket recording the problem and any related information.When a customer reaches out [...]

Unicorn

A unicorn is a startup company that through private investment alone is valued at over $1 billion. The woman who coined the term, venture capitalist Aileen Lee, did so to describe the rarity with which any company, ahead of an IPO could have attracted so much investment. Despite their mythical [...]

Unstructured data

If data isn’t in a predefined uniform format or entered in to set fields, it is considered unstructured data. Emails, word documents, social media posts, photographs, audio files and videos are all examples of unstructured data. Unstructured data is of huge value when it comes to understanding customer sentiment or [...]

Visual interactive voice response (Visual IVR)

Visual Interactive Voice Response (Visual IVR) is a technology used in contact centres that makes it easier to understand exactly why a customer is getting in contact and to give that caller the tools to attempt to solve their own problem rather than wait in a calling queue. If a [...]

Voicebot

A voicebot enables its user to interact with a device or a service simply by speaking. Powered by artificial intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP), a voicebot can understand a spoken question or request and structure a fitting audio response. Although not identical, it helps to view a voicebot in [...]