Call center - Industry term referring to a company phone center that handles such services as help desk, customer support, lead generation, emergency response, telephone answering service, inbound response and outbound telemarketing.

Call distribution - Call center software feature that routes an inbound call to the most appropriate company representative (agent) based on the type of call.

Dispatch call - Call center feature that relays a call taken by a "dispatcher" to the most appropriate person to handle the call. Typically, a call is dispatched via pager or cell phone to a representative in the field.

Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS) - Numbers passed from the public telephone network to identify what phone number the caller dialed.

Handling time - Time a call center representative spends talking to a caller plus the time the representative spends processing the call afterwards.

Help desk - Type of call center call that involves product use and support. Common for computer hardware and software applications.

Inbound call center - Call center services that support calls received from a customer. Inbound call center calls typically include customer support and help desk calls.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) - IVR is used to provide an interactive set of menu options that the caller selects with a phone keypad options for more information. IVR is commonly found in businesses to direct callers to the appropriate department.

Outbound call center - Call center services that consist of calls made by a company representative out to customers. Outbound call center calls are primarily telemarketing calls.

Patching - see 'Dispatching'

Personal broadcast - A type of outbound call center call that consists of a pre-recorded message that is phoned out automatically to a large number of customer phone numbers stored in a database.

Predictive dialers - Outbound call center software or hardware where phone numbers in a database are automatically dialed. Once a connection is made with a person, the call center routes the call to a company representative. Predictive dialers can detect if there is no answer, if the line is busy, or if an answering machine picks up, at which time the telephone number is automatically disconnected and put back into the the queue to be dialed again.

Queue - In a call center, the queue is where callers are held who are not connected immediately with a live call center representative. Callers are connected with the next available person depending on where they are placed in the queue.

Service level - In the context of a call center, service level is the percentage of incoming calls that are answered live in an specified amount of time.