Glossary of Terms

These functions allow an agent to assign a case to a user or queue, and to track the age of an item that has been transferred to a queue.

Third-party address cleaning and verification products standardize addresses, making them easier to search and match, as well as reducing mailing costs by confirming that an address is valid.

This is the main desktop or Workbench for an agent where they launch new activities such as creating new cases, retrieving existing cases, running reports, or processing work flow.

Astute Chat for Facebook allows users to chat with agents in your call center through Facebook.

Optional audit trails can track each modification to a field, including the person, date, time, original and new value.

Rules-based notifications can be configured to send case information to supervisors or other interested parties (risk management, legal, and quality).

Rule-based activities can suggest a letter, enclosure, compensation, and other data collection and fulfillment activities based on data provided by the customer. For example, if a customer sends an email with a complaint about a specific product, the system can suggest a complaint-response letter, a paragraph referring to their specific product and complaint, and a coupon or other compensation to be sent with the correspondence.

This feature allows for cases, such as inbound emails, to be automatically assigned to the next available agent. Similarly, it can pop a new case on the agent's screen when they answer an inbound call.

If a case remains unresolved for a defined period of time, these rules prompt the system to automatically escalate the case to a supervisor or supervisor queue. For example, this functionality can also be used to transfer normal cases from an agent to QA personnel.

Based on the address of the customer associated with a case, this feature allows an agent to review history for all previous cases for the customer, and allows the agent to open any case from the history. This also allows an agent to review previous issues and answers that have been provided.

Case management is the core set of functions that allows the recording of customer information, their issues or questions, and the agent's response in the form of notes, emails, or letters. The system also allows the agent to compensate the user for a bad experience and to track the goodwill compensation and number of times the customer has engaged the contact center. Case management also includes reporting functions for analysis of customer contacts, including preventative analysis.

These are electronic "inboxes" that hold pending cases on a first in-first out basis. Agents automatically draw the oldest, highest priority case from the queue first.

Multiple agents are able to work on various aspects of a case by separating individual issues within a case. Each issue can be worked on and closed separately. When all issues are closed, the overall case can be closed.

This feature offers computer-telephony integration, including call controls in the agent desktop (pickup, disconnect, hold, mute, transfer, conference, etc.) and screen pop with call information when the agent answers.

The job and focus of each agent may vary. Users can determine which starting screen they see when they return to the Workbench. This may include reports which refresh agent statistics and workload information that monitor the agent’s key performance indicators.

The layouts for each data entry screen can be customized to the specific fields required for a user, including the order in which the fields appear. Layouts can also be configured to highlight required fields and highly suggested fields.

Users can determine the fields and labels for reports. They can define dates and times as variables so that a report can be saved to run on demand or on schedule. For example, the appropriate time frame can be automatically substituted for daily, weekly, or quarterly reports.

This function allows electronic document signatures, including scanned signatures which can be included in letters.

Administrators can create standardized email responses that include preset content, and can merge in data from the database that is specific to a customer and their case or issue. This allows greater quality control, faster responses, and also allows for personalization of the response.

An email auto-response can be configured to let a customer know that their information has been received and when they can expect a response. This functionality is especially helpful if your contact center is closed overnight or on weekends.

Using POP3, SMTP, and other standard protocols, this function can send and receive emails using most corporate emails systems.

This function assists in the analysis data trends by providing graphical reports.

This function provides configurable reports, which can be saved as favorites, as well as ad-hoc and SQL level reporting.

The event scheduler is a system clock-based utility that allows various activities to be scheduled to run at a future time or to run repeatedly on a scheduled basis.

Facebook Chat allows users on your Facebook fan page to send a message to your contact center agents for response using a configurable form that displays on the fan page.

Using survey design functions, a survey can be published as a web page to a server hosted by Emplifi, and a link can be provided to customers to take the survey online. Survey results are automatically sent to Astute Agent and added to the case database for reporting.

Application Programmer Interface and web services allow integration with other systems.

Additional sets of fields to capture data about an issue can be added to each issue captured on a case.

This function called InfoCenter allows agents to look up information to answer customer questions. InfoCenter can be configured to automatically pop answers as alerts in instances where the agent has recorded a specific issue and exact information should be shared with a customer. The knowledge base can also be used as a catalog to look up information as needed.

With this function you can merge data from the database (including address, case, and issue information) into a form letter that can be emailed or printed and mailed.

This utility allows you to create and send product offers, newsletters, surveys, and other items. This information is based upon a list of addresses within the database.

Case information can be created using a mobile application. It can also be created in the contact center and sent to field staff using a mobile application on their smart phone, tablet, or mobile browser.

Administrators can control which users have access to case data through Astute Agent Mobile, and can customize the data that is exchanged.

For companies with multiple brands, or outsourcers dealing with multiple companies, this feature allows agents to switch between company configurations which may have different data collection and knowledge base resources.

This feature can display currency in the appropriate international format.

Agent-facing screens can be displayed in the native language of the agent (default is English).

This feature allows agents to receive and create correspondence with the customer in the customer’s native language, even if the administrator chooses to manage the data collection and reporting in a different language.

Astute Knowledge Agent Assist allows agents to pose customer questions to your knowledge base, which uses Natural Language Processing to determine the best answer and to analyze intent.

Data sets can be imported to allow reports to be normalized against sales or production data. This minimizes the effects of seasonal fluctuations, allowing contact rates to be compared to market activity.

For Quality Assurance, legal, or other groups that may need to review case data, but should not change it, read-only users can be configured.

This feature accumulates a count and a compensation total (separately) for a defined time period. These numbers allow the system to display a message to identify people who engage the contact center at a higher-than-normal rate, and who may be trying to get compensation that exceeds the norm. You can use this information to determine if the customer is loyal and engaged, or involved in fraudulent activity.

Definable roles allow the system administrator to assign functional access to the system based on the jobs that similar users perform. This allows an agent, supervisor, quality assurance, and analyst to have different access across roles, but similar access to others in the same role.

Before rolling out new functionality in production, the sandbox (training environment), which comes with every system, provides a place to experiment without jeopardizing production data.

Using the event scheduler, an import of data (such as address or balance information) can be scheduled to import at a defined time or on a repeating basis.

Using the event scheduler, a report can be scheduled to run at a defined time or on a repeating basis, and can be saved as a file or distributed with email.

Using the event scheduler, a utility (such as a mass mailing) can be scheduled to run at a defined time or on a repeating basis.

A survey allows an administrator to create a list of questions with various answer formats (multiple choice, short answer, yes/no) which can be used as a script for the agent during a call to collect information, or to be sent to a customer to solicit information related to product or service experience.

A threshold is a configurable "high water mark" that allows you to set a value and, if the number of cases exceeds that value for a specified period of time, alerts you to a possible issue. For certain types of contact and depending on the contact center’s needs, even one case could trigger the alert.

Most contact centers have service level agreements (SLA) which they set as targets to determine the normal response time for a call, email, letter, or other contact. If a case is placed in queue, and exceeds a configured SLA, a visual queue (highlighted in yellow or red) will show that the queue contains cases that have or are in danger of exceeding the SLA, indicating that they need more urgent attention.

In addition to Astute Web Chat, Astute Agent also integrated with third-party chat systems like LivePerson and Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center.

This feature allows the use of web forms to collect data from a consumer on a web site. The data can be sent from the web site to Astute Agent as a formatted email message, which can automatically create a new case.

To save time and increase data accuracy, whitepages lookup software can retrieve a caller’s name and address based on their phone number.

For cases in which multiple steps are required to resolve an issue or answer a customer question, cases can be transferred to another user or queue as part of a defined approval process.