There’s a lot of jargon in the telecoms and call centre industry! We even use some of it on our own website. We’ve put together a handy glossary of terms that will help you to understand some of the terminology involved.

DDI

– Direct Dialling Inward (sometimes called DID) is a feature offered by telephone companies for use with their customers’ PBX system. A telephone company allocates a range of numbers all connected to their customer’s PBX.

ISDN

– Integrated Services Digital Network – a type of circuit switched telephone network system. It allows digital (as opposed to analogue) transmission of voice and data over ordinary telephone copper wires. It results in better quality and higher speeds than you get with analogue systems.

IVR

– Interactive Voice Response – a computerised system that allows a person, typically a telephone caller, to select an option from a voice menu in order to interface with a computer system.

PBX

– Private Branch eXchange (or Private Business eXchange) – a telephone exchange owned by a private business. As opposed to one owned by a common carrier or by a telephone company.

PSTN

– Public Switched Telephone Network – the concentration of the world’s public circuit-switched telephone networks.

RFC

– Request for Comments – is one of a series of Internet informational documents and standards. Both commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities use it a lot.

SIP

– Session Initiation Protocol – a protocol developed by the IETF MMUSIC Working Group. It’s a proposed standard for initiating, modifying, and terminating an interactive user session that involves multimedia elements such as video, voice, instant messaging, online games, and virtual reality.

VoIP

– Voice over Internet Protocol – the routing of voice conversations over the Internet (or any other IP-based network).

WebRTC

– Web Real-Time Communication – a collection of communications protocols and application programming interfaces. They enable real-time communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC allows web browsers to not only request resources from backend servers, but also real-time information (RTI) from the browsers of other users.