Glossary

An abandoned call (inbound) is a call that entered the queue, but was disconnected by the caller before it reached an agent, or perhaps the system disconnected the interaction before reaching the agent. 

Outbound campaigns have two types of abandoned calls: True Abandon and Compliance Abandon. For a True Abandon call, the contact answers the call, but hangs up before the system routes the call to an available agent. For a Compliance Abandon call, the contact answers the call, but the system does not route the call to an available agent within the configured Compliance Abandon Threshold (default is two seconds).

This metric represents the number of abandons compared to the number of calls offered to Genesys Cloud ACD for agent selection. Some industries issue abandon rate standards or guidelines, while some industries are regulated by abandoned rates. This metric can indicate which queues are not staffed to handle interactions in a timely manner. Formula: Abandoned in Assignment/Offered to Assignment. Pertains to the distribution queue and the contact center. 

In Documents, each user or group in a group workspace has an access level. The access level determines what a user or group can do with the files in the workspace.

ACD is a standard contact center term used to reference the system, device, or entity that automatically answers incoming calls and assigns waiting interactions to the most appropriate agent based on the caller’s needs using routing rules. ACD calls are associated with a queue.

Non-ACD calls are not associated with a queue.

Required by the system, the addressable name must be unique to enable a station to send and receive calls. The SIP addressable name forms the user part of a SIP address: SIP address=sip:<addresstablename>@host.

An addressable resource is any object in the system that can receive a call.

Admin copilot focuses on providing administrative personnel in contact centers with AI-powered tools to streamline operations. This includes automating scheduling, workforce management, analytics and reporting tasks. By leveraging AI, admin copilot helps in optimizing resource allocation, predicting call volumes and enhancing overall operational efficiency.

The number of times after-call work (ACW) was completed. After-call work is the work that an agent performs immediately following an interaction. Work may involve keying activity codes, updating customer databases, filling out forms, or initiating outbound contact. As a metric, it indicates the total time an agent takes to finish working on a call. If an agent must complete work before the agent can handle the next contact, then ACW is factored into the average handle time. 

For more information on configuring after call work, see Configure after call work settings.

For more information on ACW used in various views, see Agents Performance Detail view, Queues activity detail view, and Agents performance summary view as examples. 

A person who is the primary point of human customer contact and manages inbound or outbound calls and other customer interactions for an organization. This person might have a wide range of responsibilities involving account inquiries, complaints, or product and support issues. An agent is also known as a customer service representative (CSR).

Coaching is used to give call center agents feedback as part of quality management and employee training. It can be part of regular performance assessments, or done in real time when needed during customer interactions.

Agent copilot refers to an AI-driven feature within contact center software that assists customer service agents by providing real-time information, suggestions and automated actions. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand customer queries and guide agents with the best responses, knowledge articles or next steps, thereby improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Agent load is a time-related metric that indicates the two components of handling time: talk time and after-call work.

An agent-owned callback is a callback where an agent takes ownership of the callback to ensure a one-to-one relationship with the customer. An agent-owned callback waits for the assigned agent to become available to receive it.

When an agent takes ownership of a callback, the callback waits for the agent to become available for time configured in Agents can own a scheduled callback for. When an agent does not own a callback, it automatically routes to the next available agent if the scheduling agent is not available at the scheduled time. For agent-owned callbacks to take effect, there must be at least one Preferred Agent Routing rule set on the queue.

Agentless dialing mode dials multiple phone numbers. Then it uses call analysis to detect whether each call was answered, whether by a live person or answering machine. Busy signals, SIT tones, and no answer outcomes can be disconnected. Live speakers and answering machines can be played a message. A live contact can be transferred to an outbound IVR call flow.

An AI call center agent is a virtual agent powered by AI technologies designed to handle customer service interactions. It can understand and respond to customer queries, resolve issues and perform transactions. This offers a scalable and cost-effective way to handle high volumes of inbound requests without hiring additional human agents.

Alternation constructs modify a regular expression to enable either/or matching.

Analytics refers to a broad body of data analysis and reporting tools that enable organizations to analyze disparate data to uncover correlations and better understand customer trends and business activities.

The Genesys Business Optimization – Analytics solution represents the tools and technologies that provide real-time and historical data used to generate reports, and provide analysis on the effectiveness and efficiency of the business.

Anchors, or atomic zero-width assertions, cause a match to succeed or fail depending on the current position in the string, but they do not cause the engine to advance through the string or consume characters.

In Quality Management, an annotation is a bookmark that a quality evaluator adds in the Interactions Detail playback pane to mark a point in the recording for future reference. An annotation is visible to any contact center user who views the recording.

An announcement is a recording that is played to callers.

A measurement of the number of assigned ACD interactions answered by an agent in a given period. Answered increments when the agent is the first to connect to the interaction.

Architect is an application that executes flows for the various media types that are supported by Genesys Cloud.

In Documents, an attribute is a form of meta data that helps standardize how content is organized throughout an organization.  Admins create attributes based on business needs and users assign attributes to files as they work with them. Attributes also provide another way to find files easily.

All contact center vendors offer automated attendant functionality for handling incoming interactions. Auto-attendant applications contain business logic for building work flows to route, categorize, define, and prioritize interactions. Businesses use auto-attendants to improve the customer experience, extend business capabilities (such as hours of operation), or offload volume from agents to self-service applications. Auto-attendants exist for each distinct media type (such as voice and chat). Each media type has different rules and requirements for interaction handling with some of the same high-level business logic. Auto-attendants are easy-to-learn applications that do not require scripting or understanding of a programming language. 

The use of technology to automatically deliver personalized content and experiences to customers based on data-driven insights into their needs, preferences and behaviors. Smart automation leverages customer, employee and interaction data to drive real-time action and simplify workflows — improving the user experience while increasing efficiency. Modern solutions enable organizations to leverage this real-time automation easily — and clearly understand and optimize outcomes — without a team of data scientists.

For those SIP phones that support RFC 5373, the auto-answer feature enables incoming calls to be connected to the agent automatically.

The automatic best method selection forecasting method uses best practices, outlier detection, mathematical fixes for missing data, and advanced time-series forecasting techniques to develop individual forecasts with the lowest possible error. Unlike the weighted historical index method, the automated best method selection option uses all available historical data.

ASR is the translation of spoken words into text. ASR is also known as computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). 

The average amount of time agents spent handling interactions. This calculation includes talk time, hold time, and after-call work. For outbound calls it also includes dialing and contacting time.

Calculated by: (cumulative talk time + cumulative hold time + cumulative after-call work + cumulative dialing time + cumulative contacting time) / Number of interactions handled

The average amount of time that it takes from the initial arrival of an interaction into the interaction management system to the delivery of that interaction to an endpoint—for example, the average amount of time that a caller will wait in queue for an agent to become available. The unit of measurement is influenced by the average length of each call, the number of agents who are available, and the total number of calls that are arriving.

This metric represents the average amount of time an agent spends interacting with a customer per talk segment for a defined period of time.

Calculation: Talk time per interaction segment/# of talk segments

For example, an agent handles ten calls, each with two talk time segments of three minutes each. 3,600 sec/20 segments = 180 seconds or 3 minutes

Talk segments occur each time an agent talks to a customer. For example, an agent talks with a customer for two minutes, then places the customer on hold for two minutes. The agent returns to talk to the customer for two more minutes, and then disconnects. There are two talk time segments for this interaction.

Only interactions that end within a given time period are used to calculate the average talk time for that period.

See also: talk time

Back office management is the administration of a company’s human resources, technology and services. The back office typically supports, and works to deliver on, the objectives and promises of the front office team.

Back office departments are historically far less efficient than customer-facing organizations or contact center operations. The lack of coordination between various systems causes a maze of disconnected workloads, systems, and people. Without optimal workload management, tasks and customer communication are siloed, resulting in frustrated customers and unmotivated employees. Organizations who manage the back office successfully see an increase in customer and employee satisfaction and overall brand loyalty.

A capability provided by Natural Language Speech Recognition that allows callers to speak or enter their responses during the prompt and have those responses recognized. See also echo cancellation.

Bidirectional synchronization is a field-level setting for integration mapping. This means that data copies in both directions, from Genesys Cloud to a third-party system or vice versa, instead of having one system as the designated source.

A blocked call is one that cannot be connected either at the service provider level (all trunks/channels are busy and call could not be delivered) or the system level.  

A bot decides that it is necessary to exit the bot session, usually because the user requests to speak to an agent.

Breadcrumbs are navigational aids that display your current location. Breadcrumbs also provide quick, one-click access to site destinations.

BYOC, or Bring Your Own Carrier is an telephony communications model allowing businesses to choose their preferred telecom carriers. More specifically, BYOC allows businesses to define SIP Trunks between Genesys Cloud and third-party carrier devices or carrier services. BYOC is available in two distinct offerings, named according to where the connection terminates against Genesys Cloud:

• BYOC Premises: Define SIP Trunks between premises-based Edge hardware devices and third-party systems.
• BYOC Cloud: Define SIP Trunks between Genesys Cloud Media Tier resources in AWS and third-party systems over the public Internet.

Bullseye routing is a strategy in which the number of agents included in consideration for an interaction is expanded incrementally over a period of time. This strategy draws its name from the visualization of a bullseye target in which an interaction is queued for the most desired agents — or the center — but the pool of agents expands. For more information, see Bullseye routing overview.

The Genesys Business Optimization solution represents all tools and technologies that optimize the contact center workforce, configure, monitor and measure business results, and effectively integrate with other systems. 

An BYOC Premises Edge group is a set of BYOC Premises Edge devices that are directly connected to one another over a high-bandwidth and low-latency network. The purpose of an Edge group is to allow all Edges in the group to access and share trunks connected to other Edges in the Edge group. For more information, see BYOC Premises Edge groups overview.

In Quality Management, calibration is a set of features that support consistency in quality evaluation. Quality administrators select recorded interactions for calibration and assign quality evaluators to the calibration evaluations. Then, quality evaluators complete the calibration evaluations and results are compiled to make it easy to view variation in the evaluations.

In Quality Management, a calibration policy specifies the calibrator as the user who can access the results of policy-assigned calibration interactions in their dashboard view. The calibrator cannot also be an evaluator or an expert evaluator for the calibration interaction.

Call analysis is an Edge process that analyzes a connection to determine if the call reached a live person, fax machine, or answering machine. Call analysis is also known in the industry as call progress analysis (CPA), call progress detection (CPD), and answering machine detection (AMD). AMD technology, improved through machine learning, accurately identifies whether an incoming call is answered by a human or an answering machine. This enhances agent productivity by reducing the time spent on calls that do not reach a live person.  Genesys uses its own Patented Call Analysis.

Call blending is the coordinated delivery of both inbound and outbound calls to the same set of agents. For more information on blending inbound and outbound calling, see Plan for outbound dialing.

A call flow is the organizational process, typically audio files and menu options, of the caller’s experience prior to agent assignment. A call flow can be the inbound auto-attendant, an inbound or outbound IVR, or the call’s in-queue handling.

A call prompt is a .wav audio file that Architect plays to guide callers through an interaction.

A campaign is a configuration approach to dialing a list of external numbers and delivering those calls to a queue or call flow. Campaign configurations include: the dialing mode, contact list, do not call list, scheduled calling times, outbound flows, and agent scripts.

CDM is an acronym for Cloud Deployment Model and indicates a Genesys Cloud environment where the Edge devices are hosted in the cloud. All Genesys Cloud Voice environments are CDM.

A character class matches any one of a set of characters in an input string.

Allows agents and supervisors to communicate during a contact. Reduces hold times and increase first and final contact resolution.

A classification describes a type of outbound call, such as emergency or long-distance. Classifications contain code that enables the system to classify the call type of a normalized phone number and to specify the routing path for the particular type of call. Each site has its own set of classifications.

Cloud applications refers to the application server that handles most of the application and switching logic. Matching of interactions to agents, client, supervision, and configuration are all handled here. This server is designed with cloud architecture techniques (for example, RESTful APIs) to take advantage of the robust and powerful back-end services (for example, NoSQL data stores and caching services) now available from providers (Amazon Web Services and others).

The Genesys Employee Engagement – Collaboration solution represents the tools and technologies that equip agents to connect and interact with other agents and customers individually and in groups.

Concatenative audio occurs when you build an audio phrase by playing two or more audio files in succession. For example, if hello.wav contains “hello,” pause.wav contains 250 ms of silence, mister.wav contains “mister,” and lastname.wav contains “phelps,” you could play or queue all four files in a row. The resulting playback is a smooth equivalent of “Hello, Mr. Phelps.”

Configuration objects are specific resources within your organization. A division is a separate unit that allows you to group and separate configurable objects, but keep them inside the same organization. Divisions can be organized by business unit, office location, country, brand, or any other classification you define.

In Genesys Cloud, administrators can move objects into divisions and then grant users access to specific objects based on access control. Configurable objects include:

• Call routing objects
• Coaching appointments
• Contact lists
• Data tables
• Do not contact lists
• Emergencies
• Extensions
• Flows
• Flow milestones
• Flow outcomes
• Learning modules
• Management units
• Message routing objects
• Outbound campaigns
• Queues
• Schedules
• Schedule groups
• Users

Administrators can group and associate specific Genesys Cloud configuration objects within a division, and then using access control, selectively grant user access to the objects in that division. 

The contact metric indicates interactions connected to and handled by an agent. 

A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the internet.

Contact center shrinkage refers to the amount of time that call center agents are not available to handle customer interactions, even though they are scheduled to be working.

Workflow management is the administration of a sequence of tasks and processes throughout an organization’s workforce. It is the way in which organizations manage the daily operations of the call center, including forecasting, scheduling, employee training, reporting, and all customer interactions. Call center management can be modernized through use of workforce optimization solutions. 

Contact center workforce planning is the process of aligning the strategic and operational elements of a contact center workforce with organizational objectives. It is the systematic, ongoing process of effective planning, forecasting, and scheduling to provide more efficient distribution of interactions and work across channels.

A conversation is another term for interaction and is more frequently referred to in the Developer Center, such as in its overview for conversations and in the use of conversation APIs. 

In the context of AI and contact center software, copilot is a general term for an AI assistant that supports various roles (agents, supervisors and admins) by providing real-time assistance, insights and automation capabilities. It enhances decision-making, productivity and customer experiences through intelligent recommendations and actions.

In Quality Management, critical question is an evaluation form question type used to prioritize questions that are critical to the success of an interaction. Using these questions, Genesys Cloud calculates a critical score, which reflects an agent’s compliance with the critical questions. Critical questions must be scored “Yes” or “No.”

The Genesys Customer Engagement solution represents the products that support a variety of communication channels used to provide excellent Customer Experience, for incoming, outgoing, and self-service interactions. 

Customer journey management is the practice of using behavioral trends and technology to influence and optimize the customer experience (CX). Customer journey management aims to minimize the customer effort across all channels and touchpoints, ensuring a positive experience every time a customer interacts with your company and helping to orchestrate a seamless end-to-end journey.

Tailoring educational content and experiences to fit the individual needs of learners. With modern workforce engagement management capabilities, businesses can empower each employee with a personalized development hub that puts them in control. They can manage their performance and access assigned learning content and coaching sessions — all while staying on top of their work, and the business can build learning modules to train or inform its employees, and assign assessment modules to better evaluate their knowledge and skill levels.

A dashlet is a small application on a dashboard that displays a specific type of information, usually from a service.

A Designated Contact is a Genesys Cloud customer user who is identified as the primary liaison between the customer and Genesys Cloud Customer Care. A Designated Contact must be knowledgeable about the applicable services and participates in troubleshooting support cases. 

Become a Designated Contact by first reviewing the Customer areas of responsibility. Then go to the Customer Care log in page and select Get Started to request a My Support account and get access to our Genesys support tools. Allow 48 business hours to receive your credentials. 

See number plan.

Dialing mode is a campaign setting that determines how contacts are dialed. Each campaign can have a different dialing mode. Based on dialing mode, information from the contact list can be presented to the agent before dialing occurs, or calls can be matched to an agent only after they are connected to a live party.

DID is a series of digits passed by the telecommunications service provider with an inbound call.

Genesys Cloud ACD uses distribution queues (or queues) in the matching of agents and interactions. Distribution queue is a singular attribute (criteria) that is tagged on an interaction. It is also a 1:n attribute on an agent. Teams are assigned distribution queues as attributes. Agents join distribution queues to handle tagged interactions. Agents who leave a distribution queue no longer handle interactions tagged for that queue.

A division is a separate unit that allows you to group and separate configurable objects, but keep them inside the same organization.

Divisions can be organized by business unit, office location, country, brand, or any other classification you define. In Genesys Cloud, administrators can move objects into divisions and then grant users access to specific objects based on access control.

Configurable objects include:

• Business units
• Call routing objects
• Campaigns
• Contact lists
• Data tables
• Do not contact lists
• Emergencies
• Flows
• Flow milestones
• Flow outcomes
• Management units
• Message routing objects
• Outbound campaigns
• Queues
• Schedules
• Schedule groups
• Scripts
• Users

DNIS is the number dialed by the calling party.

Do Not Contact refers to the various regulating authorities and legislation that dictate how businesses who engage in outbound campaigns maintain a list of contacts that do not want to be contacted. A Do Not Contact list ensures that the business does not contact those contacts as part of an outbound campaign.

The domain name system is a hierarchical decentralized naming system for computers, services, or any resource that is connected to the Internet or a private network. The system associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities.

DTMF is the signal generated when a caller presses a telephone key to make IVR selections or to enter information such as an account number or credit card number.

E.164 is the specification for a numeric telephone addressing scheme used by public switched telephone networks (PSTN) and various other data networks. E.164 numbers can address any phone connected to a PSTN. Genesys Cloud converts E.164 numbers to other address formats so that a caller can dial a number and call phones that belong to digital networks.

Numbers in the E.164 format contain a Plus sign (+), the Country code, the Area code/national destination code, and the Local phone number.

For example, in the USA, the country code is 1. So the E.164 format of the number 317-555-1212 would be +13175551212. In the UK, the country code is 44. So the E.164 format of the number 20-7183-8750 would be +442071838750

An Edge is the hardware device that is responsible for handling telephony events and media at the “edge” of the cloud network when using the BYOC Premises telephony connection option. Under this type of connection, an Edge provides media processing, SIP, and telephony services for the Genesys Cloud platform. For more information, see About BYOC Premises. 

An Emergency Location Identification Number (ELIN) is a ten digit DID number you purchase from the local exchange carrier (LEC), and is one way for organizations to provide specific location information to the public safety answering point (PSAP) for a 911 call. During a 911 call, the ELIN takes the place of the caller’s telephone number as the ANI and is used to route the call to the appropriate PSAP. The PSAP uses the ELIN to query the automatic location identification (ALI) database and retrieve the caller’s location. 

Depending on a company’s jurisdiction regulations, industry, or internal policies, Genesys Cloud may need to be enabled to connect with public emergency services, such as 911 in the United States. There are multiple ways that emergence services can be integrated with Genesys Cloud. For more information, see Configure 911 or other emergency numbers.

The Genesys Employee Engagement solution represents all of the products and tools that equip contact-center and business employees to efficiently and successfully serve customers. For more information, see Genesys Solutions for Employee Engagement.

The employee role in Genesys Cloud has the lowest level of permissions and is automatically assigned to all users when they are added to an organization. This role cannot be removed from an organization. To grant additional permissions, an administrator must assign additional roles to the user. 

In Quality Management, encryption helps the contact center comply with PCI (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requirements to encrypt the transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks. Encryption keys can be changed to protect data from an external attack. While Genesys recommends that you generate new encryption keys at least annually, check with your company IT security resource to ensure that keys are generated to comply with your company security and data encryption requirements. For more information about encryption keys, see Encryption keys page.

An endpoint is a link to a communication provider. An endpoint might be a gateway, a long-distance line, a SIP carrier, or any other type of entity that brokers contact between the Edge and the outside world. An endpoint must be physically connected to an Edge.

Ensemble forecasting is a post-processing activity that evaluates multiple forecasting models and combines them to create one forecast. The ensemble model consists of a combination of different forecast models such as ARIMA, Holt Winters, Random Walk, and Moving Average. Combining the various models increases the overall accuracy of the forecast and avoids overvaluing any peaks or valleys from a specific model.

ePHI refers to any electronic protected health information that is covered under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. 

An escape sequence is a sequence of characters used to represent special characters within string literals. The characters in an escape sequence do not represent themselves when used inside the string literal, but instead translate into another character or sequence of characters that can be difficult to represent on its own.

In a string literal, an escape sequence is identified by a backslash (\) that is followed by a letter or other character.

Evaluation forms are score cards that supervisors use to evaluate agent performance.

Strategies used to customize individual touchpoints for customers based on knowledge of their needs, preferences and behaviors. Personalizing events is an important part of the process of experience orchestration, which intends to personalize entire experiences for customers. This increases customer engagement and satisfaction alike.

Experience orchestration is the process of identifying and crafting the ideal end-to-end journey for each individual customer, improving their experience and your business outcomes alike. It enables a business to coordinate technology, interactions and touchpoints based on customer intent to build the experiences that you want customers to have across all channels of engagement. It works by using automation to uncover real-time insight about customer interactions as they happen. You can use this information for proactive decision-making, taking action when it will be most impactful and appropriate.

During a calibration, an expert evaluator reviews and scores recorded interactions. The evaluator’s scores serve as a scoring index to measure other quality evaluators.

An extension base is the base inbound dialing number to which a call is routed before it is routed to a specific extension. For example, a user might have an extension base (direct dial number) of +19196769805, and an extension of 9805.

A person you interact with who is not a member of your Genesys Cloud organization. 

An external participant is an external party to a live or recorded interaction, and is normally the caller or customer.

A failure routing plan is a service that allows set-up of an inbound telephony number routing plan with the carrier that can either manually or automatically be enabled if the PSTN provider SIP trunking services are interrupted. If a carrier offers this service, then Genesys advises customers to set up a basic routing plan for mission critical telephone numbers.

In Quality Management, fatal question is an evaluation form question type, which, if scored “No,” results in an evaluation form score of zero. Fatal questions are also critical questions and must have “Yes” or “No” scores. For more information about fatal questions, see Configure a fatal question.

Unlike inbound ACD systems, use of predictive dialers is governed by certain state and federal statutes, depending on the purpose of the outbound dial. For companies that engage in telesales, compliance with Do Not Call registries has emerged from an internal best practice into state and federal regulation.

Flow-outs are interactions that enter and leave a queue without getting answered by an agent and without getting disconnected. Flow-outs are an indication of customer service level and queue productivity. High numbers of flow-outs can indicate staffing issues or ineffective agents when used with high handle times (bullseye matching metrics).

Flow-outs can include transfers to voicemail, callbacks, and any system-driven events such as in-queue flows that transfer to another queue or external party after a certain amount of time. Flow-outs can also occur if the caller opts to exit out of the queue and return to the IVR. Offered interactions are either flow-out, answered, or abandoned interactions.

A user with the Full Access level in a group workspace level in Documents, has the ability to:

• View
• Download
• Get share link
• Upload
• Add tabs
• Share
• Delete
• Move
• Edit
• Manage tags

Genesys Cloud CX 2 Digital and Genesys Cloud CX 3 Digital licenses are Genesys Cloud packages. While these licenses are similar to the regular Genesys Cloud packages, they do not include voice. This workspace is optional, but optimizes the management of digital exchanges, enables multi-channel management in parallel, and includes customizable panels. For more information, see Overview of Genesys Cloud 2 Digital and Genesys Cloud 3 Digital licenses.

Genesys Cloud contact center includes all features of Communicate, which offers telephony services for calling functionality, Architect for designing auto-attendant applications, and all of the features of Collaborate for workspace collaboration.

Genesys Cloud provides a RESTful application programming interface (REST API) to help you extend and customize Genesys Cloud. For more information, see the Genesys Cloud Developer Center.

A geolocation is a geographic area that Genesys Cloud determines by IP address. An admin can enable or disable geolocation for an organization. Your geolocation appears near your name and photo on your profile page, on your contact card, at the top of a chat window, and in Genesys Cloud search results for your organization.

A specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender; the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the genders of that language.

A group workspace enables multiple Documents users to share and collaborate on content. All members of the workspace can access all of the content in the workspace.

Grouping constructs delineate subexpressions of a regular expression and typically capture substrings of an input string.

Groups are communities within your organization based on common skills, relationships, locations, or other data contained in Genesys Cloud Collaborate profiles.

The total amount of time agents spend on an interaction including time spent contacting, time spent dialing, talk time, hold time, and after call work.

Also see average handle time.

Hold time is the total time an agent places a contact on hold during an interaction segment. Hold time might indicate agent efficiency or training needs. Hold time is tracked for both agents and queues.

For example, suppose an agent talks with a contact for two minutes and then places the contact on hold for two minutes. The agent returns to check in with the contact for 30 seconds, and then places the contact on hold for 45 seconds. The agent returns to the call and talks to the contact for two minutes before disconnecting.

There is one 2-minute hold time segment and one 45-second hold time segment in this interaction.

• Total hold time (THT): Cumulative of all hold times for interactions.
• Maximum hold time (MHT): Longest hold time on an interaction in a given time.
• Average hold time (AHT): Hold time per interaction segments/# of interaction segments

Homed is the association of a phone to a site or Edge group. Phones must be homed to access an outside line and reach callers outside the organization.

An advanced level of personalization that leverages real-time data and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver highly relevant and individualized customer experiences. It’s both an art and a science that requires sharing information and context across voice and digital channels. And this requires the deployment of a modern customer experience platform that breaks down silos across channels, departments and touchpoints to create seamlessly connected experiences, journeys and relationships.

Identity resolution, sometimes known as ‘identity stitching‘, is the process of aggregating disparate identifiers into a unified customer profile in order to identify an individual in real time across various digital touchpoints.

More than device or account tracking, identity resolution seeks to fully understand the person during critical moments of their online activities.

The outcome is a comprehensive and unified view of a user’s engagement with a brand, which helps businesses create personalized experiences, improve channel reach and measurement, and ensure compliance with privacy regulations.

The amount of time an agent spends in the Idle routing status. This routing status represents agents who are On Queue and able to take interactions but are not currently working with interactions.

The Genesys Customer Engagement – Inbound solution represents incoming voice-based interactions and the various tools and technologies required to talk to customers.

An inbound call flow defines how a call is handled after it has been routed to a running instance of a published call flow. A call flow is designed and configured in Architect. The process of determining which inbound call flow Architect runs for a particular incoming call is handled in Genesys Cloud.

Creating unique customer experiences that cater to the specific needs and preferences of the individual customer. An individualized customer experience that’s orchestrated by your business to meet your customer’s goals can help build a deeper connection — as well as customer loyalty.

Enabling the Input property of a string, number, or true/false variable signifies that its value can be assigned by a source outside of a script. The variable is an input variable since its value is input from an external source, such as Architect.

The Genesys Business Optimization – Integration solution represents the tools and technologies and APIs used to integrate each product offering with other important third-party products.

An interaction is a communication (or series of communications) between two or more individuals or connection points (for example, an IVR), using any one of a variety of channels, such as a call, callback, web chat, email or message. An interaction is also referred to as a conversation, especially in the Developer Center APIs. 

An intercept message is a recorded message that informs the caller that their call cannot be connected for a variety of reasons, including network problems, local congestion, or other errors.

The FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule stipulates that internal company lists supersede exemptions to national and state Do Not Call regulations.

An internal participant is the internal party to a live or recorded interaction. The internal participant is normally a company employee or agent.

An interval is a default period for tracking contact center objectives and goals. All contact center key performance indicators and metrics are tracked against the 30-minute interval. Contact centers use this defined interval for volume forecasting and staffing, as well as to track overall contact center goals. There are 48 intervals of 30-minutes in a given day. Contact centers track the overall proportion of expected and actual contacts during these intervals. 

IVR is a telephony industry term that references the collective feature set of customer experience options pertaining to call flows, DTMF and speech entry, menus, and audio prompting. In Genesys Cloud, IVRs are built in Architect. IVR is also referred to as routing in Genesys Cloud.

Jitter is a variation in the delay of received packets that is most likely to occur on slow or heavily congested networks. Jitter can also be caused by router misconfiguration or a bad digital signal processor (DSP).

A customer journey is the sequence of steps a customer takes to achieve a goal that delivers value to themselves and to the business. It consists of multiple touchpoints and key interactions each customer or prospect has with a company—including messaging, employees, processes, products or services. Single or multiple interactions can be considered a customer journey and are part of a holistic customer experience lifecycle.

Customer journey analytics is the science of analyzing customer behavior across touchpoints and over time to measure the impact of customer behavior on business outcomes. Journey analytics accelerates a company’s ability to analyze customer journeys individually and at scale, and to score journey performance. It’s a key component in effectively orchestrating personalized customer experiences as it allows for the examination of the experience from end to end, touchpoint to touchpoint, to see where customers are getting stuck or churning and where they’re succeeding.

A technology platform that enables businesses to design, manage and optimize customer journeys across multiple channels and touchpoints. Most effective journey orchestration engines will use artificial intelligence (AI) to surface and analyze customer data, delivering the best next step toward the goal the customer wants to achieve.

KPI is a strategic, high-level measure of a contact center’s performance. While a contact center may track many performance objectives, KPIs are a subset of the most important, strategic measures of contact center success.

Common questions that a user may ask during a message interaction, and the answers to those questions. are individual question and answer pairs, or FAQs. Knowledge articles contain information that can be used to facilitate conversations with customers. When a user asks a question, Genesys knowledge services AI looks for a similar question in the knowledge base. When a similar question is found, the corresponding answer is returned to the user. If the answer is not yet in the knowledge base yet, the user can, for example, escalate it to an agent via ticket or chat.

A collection of question and answer articles that you provide and configure. These articles contain information that can be useful during conversations with customers that use your products. When a user asks a question, Genesys knowledge services AI looks for a similar question in the knowledge base. When a similar question is found, the corresponding answer is returned to the user. When you plan your knowledge base, categorize multiple question and answer articles of a similar type. Then, create and store them in a knowledge base that logically identifies the relationship between the question and answer articles. For more information, see About the knowledge workbench.

An authoring tool that enables you to create and manage knowledge, view knowledge performance, and test knowledge services. Along with the search APIs, integrates with other Genesys components to enhance the customer’s self-service experience. Use to create knowledge bases that store questions that a user might ask during a message interaction, and answers to those questions. Knowledge services use natural language understanding (NLU) to surface knowledge and successfully answer customer questions.  For more information, see About the knowledge workbench.

LDM is an acronym for Local Deployment Model and indicates a Genesys Cloud environment where the Edge devices are physically located on the customer premises.

The task of making oneself ineligible for selection by Genesys Cloud ACD for a given queue. Leave is indicated at the queue level. An agent may be configured with a list of multiple queues to which they can join and leave. Configuration does not automatically correlate to the agent receiving interactions for a queue. If an agent leaves a queue. they are no longer eligible to be assigned interactions for that queue, but their configuration state does not change.

A Letter of Authorization (LOA) provides the information that is required to authorize your current carrier to port your DID numbers to Genesys Cloud Voice. A separate form is required for each carrier from which you want to port numbers.

A library is a collection of related Response Management responses.

In Genesys Cloud, a line is a system-generated connection between objects in an Edge group. There are lines for Edges, endpoint, and station communications.

A line group is a collection of one or more SIP lines.

During a voice or web chat interaction, agents can start a screen share session from the Genesys Cloud interface. That interaction is the linked interaction. Screen share sessions cannot exist independently of their linked interaction.

This option sets up processing that Architect interprets to handle multiple incoming digits as extension numbers, rather than as menu selections. This option is enabled by default and is available in menus but not tasks or states.

A LAN is a network that connects computers and other devices in a relatively small area, typically in a single building or a group of buildings. Most LANs connect workstations and personal computers and enable users to access data and devices (for example, printers and modems) anywhere on the network.

The local exchange is the telephone company exchange where subscribers’ lines terminate. It is the last central office encountered before the connection to a subscriber’s phone equipment.

In Genesys Cloud, localization is the process of setting up the endpoints, classifications, and call routing rules for a specific location or site. Localization can also refer to the process of modifying a product, content, or a user interface to optimize it for a particular geography or locale.

A location is a specific, physical place with an address. An admin configures locations. Locations appear in the Location section of your profile.

The total amount of time a user is logged in for the specified period.

The longest held interaction is the one with the current longest elapsed hold time in a queue. 

The longest interacting interaction is the one with the longest elapsed connection time being handled by a queue. 

Managed phones are phone models that you can configure through Genesys Cloud. Through the secure (HTTPS) Genesys Cloud provisioning process, the phone is sent the configuration which includes TLS (secure certificate exchange) and redundancy (primary and secondary SIP registrations). Managed phones have default base settings profiles set up in Genesys Cloud. Mutual authentication is standard with Genesys Cloud Voice and managed phones. 

For more information, see Managed phones: models and features matrix.

Users with the appropriate permissions can manually assign waiting interactions to on-queue agents across queues, or to themselves. This feature is often referred to as cherry-picking. 

Members are individual application users whose membership can be expanded to become members of a group, workspace, or queue.

A menu is a collection of structured actions that are created in Architect and selectable by the caller, either by pressing a digit on the phone’s keypad or by speaking a valid speech recognition entry. The system takes action on the entry and progresses the call to the next defined function.

A metered evaluation policy automatically assigns evaluations to quality evaluators at a specified rate, such as 5 evaluations per hour. This option provides some randomness in assignment while ensuring real-time assignment at a manageable rate.

Modifiers change the matching behavior of the regular expression that follows them. They define how the regular expression engine must interpret the pattern of the regular expression.

Monitoring is the capability that enables a supervisor to listen to in-progress interactions in real time. For more information about monitoring agents, see Monitor agents.  

Multichannel is a combination of all forms of interactions, including voice, web chat, email, callback, fax, voicemail, and social media. The same selection algorithm is used to route interactions to agents.

Your personal workspace is called My Workspace. You are the only person who can see the content in your My Workspace.

Normalization or address normalization in Genesys Cloud supports the ability for a user to paste a phone number or a SIP address  into a “call” field in the user interface. Genesys Cloud uses regular expressions to “normalize” the user input so that the system can call using the correct syntax. For example, a user can paste “sip:+19196669811@10.0.0.90;user=phone” and the system uses a regular expression to normalize the address to tel:19196669811.

A number plan is a master routing table that handles inbound/outbound call routing.

The number of interactions routed into the queue for an agent to answer. Offered interactions are either answered, abandoned, or flow-out interactions. 

This status indicates that the user is logged out of Genesys Cloud. WebRTC phone users in offline status cannot be reached or assigned interactions. Other users cannot be assigned interactions. However, if they have a default phone assigned, they have the opportunity to answer incoming calls before calls go to voicemail.

The Genesys Employee Engagement – Omnichannel Desktop solution represents the tools and technologies that equip agents to effectively manage interactions with customers via any communication channel.

This metric represents the number of agents currently working assigned interactions. It provides a view into how many agents are currently busy. The metric is visible at the team and distribution queue levels.

This agent status indicates that the agent is on break and not available for interaction assignments.

This metric represents the number of agents currently working on non-assigned interactions. This value may not indicate misappropriated work. Non-assigned interactions could include after call work calls. 

The On Queue status indicates that the user is logged in and ready to accept routed (ACD) interactions.

The On Queue metric represents the number of agents that are on queue for a specific queue.

Online is a system state that indicates the user is logged in. It is not a user status.

The Genesys Customer Engagement – Outbound solution represents outbound contact campaigns that use various tools and strategies with the purpose of maximizing the number of Right Party Contacts for a given contact list while keeping agents productive.

Outbound dialing campaigns contact a list of people through multiple channels such as automated voice calls, SMS messages, email or social media posts according to a prescribed set of rules. Campaigns initiate interactions based on information read from a contact list. Campaigns often have a script that defines the agent experience. Outbound dialing keeps agent productivity high and idle time low. This technology allows an organization to automatically engage customers.

Outbound routes and classifications from the sites in the Edge group make up a dial plan. The routes are based on where the call comes from and where it is going. 

Outbound SIP trunking allows contact to parties outside of an organization. Because there is not the dependency of inbound telephone numbers, the architecture is simpler than inbound SIP trunking. Genesys recommends working with the PSTN provider to build a dedicated outbound SIP trunk to each Edge appliance.

Enabling the Output property of a string, number, or true/false variable tells the system to save its value for use outside of a script. The variable is an output variable because its value is output to external storage when the script executes.

Pacing is an algorithm that keeps agents as busy as possible while maintaining abandon rate goals. The pacing algorithm determines the timing and number of outbound calls. The calculation analyzes a number of factors including agent status, stage completion measurements per agent, and call list quality. The pacing algorithm uses real-time statistics to estimate when each agent will finish the current call. The system queues and places multiple outbound calls while agents are busy, to ensure that a targeted party is answering at the moment that the agent becomes available.

Parties represent the individual participants in an interaction. Basically, endpoints (users and attendants) are represented as parties in a conversation. 

A Private branch exchange (PBX)  is a private telephone network used within an enterprise. Users can communicate internally (within the company) and externally (outside the company) using different communication channels like VoIP, ISDN or analog. It allows for the sharing of outside phone lines when placing external calls. A PBX saves money, as external lines are not connected to every phone.

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a set of security policies and procedures for organizations that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information. By adhering to these standards, an organization ensures the security of credit, debit and cash card transactions and protects cardholders against fraud or other misuse of their personal information.

Permissions allow users with a particular role to do various tasks, such as create groups, set up integrations, and supervise contact center activity.

PND tables are used to track the do-not-call status of multiple telephone numbers associated with a contact.

Personally identifiable information (PII) is any information that, when used alone or with other relevant data, can identify an individual.

For more information, see the GDPR definition of “personal data”.

POTS is the basic supplying service for standard single-line telephones, telephone lines, and access to the public switched network. This service receives and places calls.

The Genesys Business Optimization – Platform solution represents the tools and technologies that manage the infrastructure and configuration of the systems that host all of the products.

In power dialing mode, a campaign waits to dial until an agent is available to process the call. When an agent goes idle, the system places calls to ensure that at least one live person answers.

Using data analytics and machine learning to predict future customer behaviors and the goals they’re trying to achieve based on information such as their past interactions. With these predictive insights, organizations can engage the customer at the right time and in the right way. For example, a company could proactively offer a precisely timed chat that’s personalized using insights from the data analysis. Over time, machine learning can iterate and improve the predictive model based on additional customer interactions.

Outbound campaigns can contact a list of people in different ways. Every campaign has a dialing mode setting that determines when and how the campaign places calls. Based on dialing mode, an agent can view information about the contact before each call is placed, or only after the call is connected to a live person. Some dialing modes do not require agents at all. In predictive dialing mode, a campaign calculates how long it takes agents to become available, based on historical metrics which include agent performance and contact list quality. Outbound dialing calculates a number of calls to dial, so that each live contact can be matched immediately to an agent who has just concluded a previous call. Genesys uses its own Patented Staging Algorithm for predictive dialing. 

For additional information on predictive dialing, see Predictive dialing best practices.

In preview dialing, an agent becoming available reviews the next contact on the contact list, and then tells the system to dial that contact, or skip to the next contact. See dialing modes for more information.

Preview dialing mode is the least aggressive dialing mode. The agent is presented with the contact’s info for review, the agent presses dial when ready, and then the agent performs call analysis.

PRI is a type of ISDN connection. In North America and Japan, this connection consists of 24 channels, usually divided into 23 B channels and 1 D channel. PRI runs over the same physical interface as T1.

Progressive dialing reduces the risk of abandonment by dialing one contact for each available agent.

The proportions metric represents the percentage of calls forecast or received for any given day in a predefined window (typically 30 minutes). In order to calculate the percentage, you need to know the call load: talk time, after call work and volume (or their variations for other contact channels). If you received 1,000 calls for the day, and 60 came in between 10:00 and 10:30, that half hour’s proportion would be 6 percent or .06 (60/1,000). Proportions are used to project patterns into the future, for example, how many calls can be expected on a typical Tuesday from 10:00AM to 10:30AM.

In telecommunications, provisioning is the process of preparing and initiating a system, such as a telephone, for new services.

The PSTN is the aggregate of the world’s circuit-switched telephone networks. The technical operation of the PSTN adheres to the standards created by the ITU-T. These standards allow different networks in different countries to interconnect seamlessly. The E.163 and E.164 standards provide a single global address space for telephone numbers. The combination of the interconnected networks and the single numbering plan make it possible for any phone in the world to dial any other phone.

A quality admin is a user with permission and access to manage quality management policies. A quality admin can also create and manage evaluation forms, assign quality evaluations, coordinate calibration assignments, and view all activity in Quality Management. For more information about the permissions included in the default Quality Admin role, see Products, roles, and permissions list. 

Quality admin policies define the criteria used to determine which interaction recordings are retained, archived, deleted, assigned for evaluation, and/or calibrated.

A quality evaluator is a user with permission and access to be assigned and to complete Quality Management evaluations and calibration evaluations.

Quality management is a set of tools and processes to ensure that all interactions are handled effectively and efficiently. Quality management includes interaction recording, real-time monitoring, search tools to locate recorded interactions, interaction evaluation and reporting, and calibration features.

Quality management policies define the criteria that Genesys Cloud uses to determine which interaction recordings to retain, archive, delete, assign for evaluation, and/or calibrate. For more information about quality management policies, see Policies page.

In the field of computer networking and other packet-switched telecommunication networks, quality of service refers to traffic prioritization and resource reservation control mechanisms. Quality of service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow.

A quantifier specifies how many instances of the previous element (which can be a character, a group, or a character class) must be present in the input string for a match to occur.

A question group is a logical group of evaluation form questions that are grouped for categorization and reporting purposes.

A queue is a “waiting line” of interactions.

In Documents, a user with the Read Only access level in a group workspace level can:

• View
• Download
• Get share link

The practice of monitoring and influencing a customer’s journey as it happens, using data analytics and automation to orchestrate experiences that align your actions with your customer’s goals. Rather than optimizing actions for individual touchpoints or fixing problems after the fact, real-time customer journey management allows a business to measure, monitor and act in-journey in a holistic way.

A regular expression (abbreviated regex or regexp) is a sequence of characters that form a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or with string matching, such as in find and replace operations. Genesys Cloud uses regular expressions to normalize phone addresses, classify calls, and format a phone number for display purposes. For more information, see examples of regular expression match and replace.

The release date/time indicates the date and time that a completed quality evaluation was released or is scheduled to be released to the agent.

A response is a predefined answer to a question that is frequently asked or that requires approved language. Agents use responses to quickly answer questions in chats, email messages, or when responding to callback requests. 

RFC is an acronym for Request For Comments. An RFC is a document that details the specifications/standards of an Internet-based technology or methodology.
RFCs are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other organzations, but the content is developed by committees of specialists and then reviewed by interested parties.

Each role in Genesys Cloud contains one or more permissions. The permissions allow users with that role to do various tasks, such as create groups, set up integrations, and supervise contact center activity. Roles are used to manage Genesys Cloud licenses within an organization. When a role is assigned to a Genesys Cloud users, the license is also assigned.

Round-Trip Time (RTT) is the amount of time that it takes for a network request to travel from a source to a destination and back again. RTT is measured in milliseconds (ms). RTT is often considered synonymous with ping time, which can be determined using the ping command.

A routing status is set by the system when an agent is on queue, and is based on the agent's current activity. Users cannot directly change routing statuses. For example, the system automatically places agents in the Not Responding status if they do not pick up an interaction within the timeout that is set for the queue. Routing statuses include: Off Queue, Interacting, Idle, Communicating, and Not Responding. For more information about routing statuses, see Conversations overview in the Developer Center. For more information about other types of statuses, see Agent presence, status, and activity indicators.

A campaign can take intelligent actions based on logic in its assigned rule sets. A rule set is a collection of call rules. The system evaluates an individual rule before it places the call or after the call ends. A rule can evaluate multiple conditions. Rule conditions determine whether to perform actions such as updating the value of a contact column.  For more information, see Rule management overview.

Campaign rules enable you to automate campaigns. A rule can evaluate a statistic, time, or event to determine whether to carry out an action that affects campaign processing of campaigns.

The safe harbor section of the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) is designed for unintentional mistakes. If a telemarketer or salesperson demonstrates that they are following routine business practices and that those practices meet the safe harbor requirements, then the telemarketer or salesperson is not penalized for mistakes.

Genesys Cloud applications, such as Architect and Outbound dialing, refer to schedules when making a determination about how to manage inbound and outbound interaction routing. For example, a schedule can determine which interaction flow to execute during closed hours or the day and time on which the outbound dialing campaign should start and stop.

An expert evaluator may be selected to score a calibration evaluation. The expert evaluator’s evaluation is the scoring index. The scoring index is the baseline against which Genesys Cloud measures all other calibration evaluations. The calibration results indicate the deviation of each calibration evaluation rating compared to the scoring index.

A screen pop application delivers an incoming call to an agent, along with data pertaining to the call or caller. For example, a customer with Salesforce.com or another CRM application may use caller id information to lookup the customer’s record in the CRM. The agent is delivered a ‘screen pop’ of the caller’s account via their Salesforce.com web browser. Or, the script for an outbound dialing campaign can populate the agent’s display with information pertaining to the call, the customer, and the campaign.

A screen share client is the application that an end-user (the sharer) uses to connect to a screen share session with a Genesys Cloud user. 

The written words and logic an agent follows while processing a call. A script can contain multiple pages of narrative mixed with fields for updating data collected or updated by the agent. Scripts can be created for inbound or outbound interactions.

Scripting is the process of assembling scripts, the words and logic for an agent to follow while processing a call. 

The secure IVR metric represents the number of calls using Secure IVR. This is a real-time counter on the IVR profile.

Secure IVR time is the total time a connected interaction was in the secure IVR.

The Genesys Customer Engagement – Self-Service solution represents the tools and technologies that support customers calling in for (agent-less) IVR-based self-service.

Service level target is a contact center performance statistic expressed as “X percent of conversations answered in Y seconds.” For example, a goal of answering 80% of voice calls within 20 seconds provides a service level target of 80/20. You can set the service level target for each media type in a queue. Analytics uses this service level target to calculate whether you are within the service level % defined by your service level agreement (SLA). For more information about setting the service level target, see Create queues or Edit or delete queues. 

The service level % is the percentage of interactions that meet your contact center's service level target. The formula to calculate the service level % is:

Number of Conversations Answered within SLA

The numerator is calculated by taking the total answered conversations and subtracting the conversations that were not answered within the SLA threshold.   

Calculated by:  (Answered Count – SLA Violation Count) 

Total Number of Conversations

The Service Level Options configuration determines the denominator. With all the options below unchecked, the denominator is the count of answered conversations.

• Include Flowouts in Calculation: Flowouts are conversations that leave a queue without abandoning and without an agent handling the interaction. Typical scenarios include a customer on a voice call accepting a callback or an in-queue call flow transferring the call to another queue/flow. With this option enabled, the total number of flowouts is included in the total number of conversations for the SLA calculation.
• Include Short Abandons in Calculation: Short abandons are abandons that happen within a specific time threshold. For more information, see the Configure abandon intervals section in Configure contact center analytics options. When enabled, the SLA calculation makes no distinction between an abandon vs a short abandon. All abandons are considered in the formula. When disabled, the short abandons are subtracted from the abandon count in the denominator.
• Include Abandons in Calculation: Abandons are conversations where the waiting party is disconnected without being answered or transferred. With this option enabled, the abandons are included in the total number of conversations. 

As the service level calculation depends on an organization’s configured options, the final formula to calculate the service level is:

A session is an informal concept that describes the time between log in until one of the following:

• The user logs out.
• The user’s access times out.
• An admin logs a user out.

SIP is a protocol for establishing, modifying, and terminating telephony sessions over an IP-based network.

Short abandons are abandons that have been disconnected in a set interval. The set interval is configured in the organization’s short abandon setting. Short abandons can also be configured to be ignored within a queue’s service level calculation. A conversation can increment a short abandon if it abandons within the threshold set for group A in the organization’s abandon interval configuration. For more information, see the Configure abandon intervals section in Configure contact center analytics options.

A short code is a short (five- or six-digit), easy to remember, phone number that you use to address and route commercial text or multimedia messages through wireless networks. There are two types of short codes: vanity and random.

• A vanity short code is a five- or six-digit phone number that you specifically select to represent your brand.
• A random short code is a five- or six-digit phone number that will be randomly selected for you.

A short name is a unique, simplified identifier for the org in Genesys Cloud. The short name is based on the company name that is entered when the org is activated. Users see the short name only when they log in.  

Genesys Cloud checks if the org short name is unique within that AWS region. However, Genesys recommends using a unique short name for each org and not reusing a short name of an org in a different AWS region.

A SIP softphone is a software program for making telephone calls using SIP-based (Session Initiation Protocol) communications. It allows you to use your computer for calls instead of a physical phone. Genesys Cloud supports various third-party SIP softphones and also offers the PureCloud Softphone . 

A SIP trunk is a physical telecommunications circuit from a SIP carrier to an Edge device. The circuit is typically either Ethernet or fiber and is used to carry SIP call control and voice traffic to and from the carrier and customer. SIP trunks are usually designated in terms of overall bandwidth in MB, versus the total number of channels of capacity. Overall capacity of a SIP trunk depends upon the voice coder selection.

A site is a container for phone and BYOC Premises Edge configuration information and must have a designated location.

Site classifications are categories of calls that have special routing instructions. Typical classifications are emergency, intercom, local, toll free, long distance, international, information, SIP, and unknown. Each classification contains the logic to recognize the call type and route the specific type of call to a trunk that enables the call to reach its destination.

A site contact is a person in a Genesys Cloud organization who is the designated contact for that location.

A skill is a task, expertise, or knowledge that an agent must have to handle an interaction. For example, skills might be Linux, Windows, billing, or sales). Agents with assigned skills can have proficiency ratings for those skills. Proficiency ratings indicate the agent’s level of expertise or knowledge of that skill. Genesys Cloud ACD considers proficiency ratings when matching agents and interactions.

Skills‐based routing uses customer data and AI to match callers with agents. Skills‐based routing considers the customer’s requested language, skills, and the nature of the request to select the agent who is best equipped to serve the customer. This enhances customer satisfaction by providing more personalized and effective service.

SMS messages, commonly referred to as “text messages,” is a service for sending short messages of up to 160 characters to mobile devices, including cellular phones, smartphones and PDAs. Messages longer than 160 characters will be split into multiple messages.

Special Information Tones (SIT) audibly indicate why a call failed. SIT tones are played prior to a recorded announcement describing the problem. A familiar SIT tone is Intercept, played when the number dialed is no longer in service. Other SIT tones indicate circuits busy, call failure, incomplete digits, and so on.

When the FTC’s telemarketing sales rule was amended in 2003 to include the federal Do Not Call Registry, many states had already drafted and enacted their own registries. Although many states merged their requests with the federal DNC Registry, a number of individual states continue to maintain their own lists.

A station is a named, addressable, logical entity that can receive and place calls. One or more stations can reside on a phone. A station can simply be a number, such as a remote station.

An agent’s status indicates the current work mode of the agent, such as On Queue or Offline. 

• On Queue: The agent is On Queue but is not currently on an interaction with a customer.
• Interacting: The agent is On Queue handling an interaction with a customer or completing after-call work for an interaction. Genesys Cloud can still route them another interaction, depending on how administrators have configured agent utilization.
• Not Responding: The agent was On Queue or Interacting and did not answer an offered interaction. The agent could still be handling and completing other previous interactions. While Not Responding, the agent does not receive new interactions.
• Communicating: The agent is on a non-ACD call, and, in relation to agent utilization and call routing, Genesys Cloud treats the non-ACD call like an ACD call. For example, administrators could configure agent utilization so Genesys Cloud does not route new interactions to agents while they on an ACD or non-ACD call. This status only appears if administrators have enabled Block calls when on a non-ACD call (excludes transfers) when they configured agent utilization.
• Available, Busy, Away, Break, Meal, Meeting, Training, or Out of Office: The agent is not On Queue and has chosen the user status.
• Away: The agent is logged on to the desktop application with the screen saver on or screen locked. In other areas where user status displays, such as a profile page, this status shows as Away.
• Offline: The agent is logged off Genesys Cloud.

Supervisor copilot is an AI tool designed to aid supervisors in monitoring and managing the performance of agents in a contact center. It offers insights into call quality, agent productivity and customer satisfaction metrics. By analyzing interactions, it can identify coaching opportunities and recommend interventions to improve team performance and ensure compliance with service standards.

System-level entries provide detailed information about background operations that a user did not cause.

A tag in Collaborate is an attribute that is associated with a user profile and that describes a specific skill, area of expertise, project, or other trait related to your role at your organization (for example, Skill: Business Accounting, Certification: CPA, or Team: Product Management). Collaborate uses tags to create relationships between users with the same traits, which enables enhanced search and group management features. 

In Genesys Cloud contact center, tags are custom attributes or criteria associated with an interaction. Tags represent information about an interaction that can be used for agent selection and assignment.

In Documents, a tags are free-form blocks of text that users create and assign to files. Tags help users organize content in a way that is meaningful to them. Users can assign any number of tags to a file. Users can also search for content by tags. 

The number of sessions where the user(s) interacted during conversations. A session includes the point where the agent joins the conversation to the point where they disconnect.

This metric represents the total amount of time that an agent spent interacting with a customer, per talk segment. 

Calculation: Talk time per interaction. For example,

• An agent talks with a customer for two minutes, then places the customer on hold for two minutes. The agent returns to talk to the customer for two more minutes, and then disconnects. There are 2 two-minute talk time segments for this interaction.

Other calculations include:

• Talking time only
• Total talk time: cumulative talk time for all interactions
• Maximum talk time: longest talk time on an interaction in a time period
• Average talk time: total talk time / working interactions

This metric represents the number of concurrent interactions actively being handled and worked on by agents (connected but not on hold). This number is calculated at the contact center, skill, and distribution queue levels.

This rule protects customers from fraudulent telemarketing calls and it bans most forms of robocalling.

A terminating wrap-up code is any wrap-up defined for a queue, whose wrap-up code mapping in outbound dialing is “Right Party Contact”, “Contact Uncallable” or “Number Uncallable”. Wrap-up code mappings prevent records from being re-dialed by a campaign when that action is not appropriate.

TTS uses speech synthesis to convert written words to a voice (audio) output. 

A tie line is a dedicated circuit that links two points without having to dial a normal phone number. You can access a tie line by picking up the telephone handset or by pushing one, two, or three buttons.

This feature uses the contact’s time of day (time zone) to prevent dialing at inappropriate times. For more information, see Automatic time zone mapping examples and Contactable time sets overview.  

TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. TLS is a highly secure transport protocol that is designed to provide secure communications over computer/phone networks. TLS is used in Genesys Cloud for security in SIP communications. Basically, TLS employs two components provide security: First, TLS uses certificates to verify that the client and server are authorized to talk to each other over the network. Second, TLS uses encryption to protect the data being transferred between the client and server.

This metric evaluates the number of agents who are members of a team and can potentially staff distribution queues, and it applies to teams, distribution queues, skills, and the contact center.

This metric represents the sum of Holding+Waiting+Talking, and is visible at the contact center, team, distribution queue, and skill levels.

The total amount of time an interaction is in a queue before an agent answers it, it flows out, or the customer abandons it. Genesys Cloud calculates the wait time in milliseconds.

A transactional object is a transaction that interacts with or travels through the system. Transactional objects include voice, callback, chat, email, and message conversations; recordings; presence history; and audit data. 

A measurement of the number of interactions an agent answered in one queue and then transferred. A transfer counts for the queue in which an agent answers the interaction. This measurement is calculated by the number of interactions blind transferred or consult transferred. 

A triggered update causes newly changed data in Salesforce to be updated in your Genesys Cloud repository in near real-time.

A trunk is a link to a communication provider. A trunk can be a gateway, a long distance line, a SIP carrier, or any other type of entity that brokers contact between the Edge and the outside world. A trunk must be physically connected to an Edge.

Trunk load is a time-related metric that includes all components of a voice interaction, other than the after-call work which does not require a circuit.

Trunk load =  Ring + Attendant/IVR + Assignment + Talk Time

The tz database is a public-domain database of time zones for locations around the world. Each location is identified by continent or ocean, and then by the name of the largest city in the region. For example, “America/New_York” represents the US eastern time zone. The string “America/New_York” is the tz name for the region. Each tz name represents the local time for that locale. See Understand time zone names for a list of tz values you can use in Genesys Cloud.

Any SIP-compliant phone can register with Genesys Cloud as an unmanaged phone. The configuration of phone features are managed outside of Genesys Cloud. Only basic SIP connection information needs to be configured in Genesys Cloud to enable the registration and a contact address. Unmanaged phones do not have default base settings profiles set up in Genesys Cloud. Unmanaged phones use a generic SIP base settings profile. Features such as TLS/SRTP and phone redundancy are possible to configure, but not as simple as with managed phones. FXS analog devices can be used with this phone type.

A user represents an actual person or potentially a programmatic entity (chatbot).  A user has multiple representations (configurations) based on media end-point, assigned distribution queues, and collection of skills and ratings.

A virtual contact center (VCC) is a solution that supports contact center agents who work in various geographical locations instead of a single physical location. Genesys Cloud offers a virtual contact center solution wherein the network and agent resources might be located at multiple geographical (physical) sites, but they perform as if all resources are located at a single site.

Voice interaction is a media type that represents phone calls, voicemail, and callback requests. Voice interaction handling requires the use of a station for a speech path.

The number of interactions that waited in the queue.

A web chat is a web-based interaction initiated by a customer from a website. Genesys Cloud handles the interaction and assigns it to an available agent who meets the selection criteria. A web chat is not the same as an instant message, an SMS text, or an SMS text chat.

WebHID (Web Human Interface Device) is a set of technologies that enables web applications to interact with human interface devices (HIDs) that take input from or provides output to humans, such as a headset.

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications) is a set of technologies that allow web browsers and mobile phones to send voice and video to each other with no additional software installations. Several Genesys Cloud features, such as the Genesys Cloud WebRTC phone use this technology. For more information, see About Genesys Cloud WebRTC phones.

Each evaluation question has an associated weighting to indicate the importance of the question. 

A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographical area.

A work team is a group of agents that a supervisor manages as a unit. See Work teams overview.

Workforce management is the process of strategically optimizing the productivity of employees, ensuring that all resources are in the right places at the right times. A workforce management strategy typically includes scheduling, forecasting, skills management and employee empowerment. Complexity increases with the need to ensure that customer service supports omnichannel customer engagement.

The tools to integrate siloed technologies and automate processes in order to reduce operational costs and to better manage employee performance, resulting in greater efficiency and higher customer satisfaction. For more information, see About Workforce Engagement Management (WEM).

The Genesys Business Optimization – Workload Management solution represents the products that distribute interactions efficiently and intelligently to the appropriate agents.

In Documents, a workspace organizes related files.

Agents use wrap-up codes to classify each interaction they handle. For example, a contact center might create wrap-up codes to track different call types, such as complaints, wrong numbers, or orders. Wrap-up codes are tracked for reporting purposes and can be used to determine why customers are contacting the organization or to further classify contact types or reasons.

A zone set is a collection of time zone entries associated with days of the week and times of day when calls can be placed to that zone.