GLOSSARY
Common terms, phrases, and definitions used in the customer experience industry and in Upstream Works omnichannel contact center solutions
Agent
Agent
An agent in an in-office or remote contact center is someone who handles incoming or outgoing customer contacts for an organization. They might handle account inquiries, customer complaints or support issues. Other terms for agents include Advocate, Ambassador and Customer Service Representative (CSR).
Agent and Customer Engagement
Contact center interactions include agent and customer engagement, and the quality of the experience that each has during interactions is critical to the organization’s success. A single workspace for all channels and contacts with full context increases both agent and customer satisfaction and improves retention and loyalty.
Agent Assist
Upstream Works Agent Assist provides real-time, AI-powered guidance to agents across channels. Integrate with the AI application of your choice to power conversation summaries, transcriptions, customer sentiment and intent, and integration with knowledge.
Agent Escalation
When required, such as for complex or atypical requests, self-service interactions like those with chat bots can be escalated to an agent with full context and conversation transcript.
AgentNow
AgentNow is a customer engagement solution that provides on-demand access to agents through a QR code or web interface. Customers and agents can connect using a mix of video, voice and chat for seamless, face-to-face conversations.
Agent Solve Rate
Agent Solve Rate is defined as the percentage of interactions resolved by an agent.
AI Messaging Link
The AI Messaging Link connects Upstream Works Unified Digital Messaging (UDM) channels with your choice of bots to provide interactive customer self-service and escalation to an agent.
AI & Bots
AI & Bots can automate the handling of routine inquiries, resulting in customer experience improvements, reduced customer effort, and cost-savings for the organization.
Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect is a cloud contact center service.
Amazon Connect Agent Desktop
We provide a feature-rich omnichannel agent desktop that unifies all customer interactions across Amazon Connect voice and Upstream Works digital channels.
Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP)
Agents use the Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP) to interact with customer contacts. It’s how they receive calls, chat with contacts, transfer them to other agents, put them on hold, and perform other key tasks.
APIs
Open APIs allow for ease of integration with third party applications, legacy systems, vertical applications, and backend databases, enabling the connection and exchange of critical data to increase efficiencies and improve CX.
Application Configuration Interface
A dedicated space within the Upstream Works Administration Module to manage, deploy and upgrade Upstream Works custom configurations.
Assist Knowledge
Upstream Works Assist Knowledge management is a centralized knowledge base that utilizes AI and Natural Language Processing for excellent content findability. Agent Assist provides agents with easy access to informative knowledge articles during customer interactions. Customer Assist offers an FAQ-style webpage for customer self-service.
AWS Marketplace
AWS is a web portal where qualified partners market and sell their software to AWS contact center customers. AWS Marketplace is an online software store that helps customers find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services that run on AWS.
Back Office
The Back Office is the part of a company that is not front-facing and can include various functions from customer support, administration, accounting and IT.
Call Center
An office set up to handle a large volume of phone calls, especially for taking orders and providing customer service, support and customer care.
Call Center Software
Call center software is a technology tool that increases the effectiveness and efficiency of a call center with specific focus on interactions between customers and in-office or remote call center agents.
Channel
A channel is a communication technology that a customer uses to communicate needs, concerns and requests. Upstream Works provides a flexible approach to channel handling that allows channels to be added with minimal configuration. Agents can handle customer contacts in the same consistent fashion, no matter what the channel.
Chat messages / Chat channel
Chat in the contact center refers to web- and text-based conversations in real-time between a customer/website visitor and an agent. Chat may or may not include chatbots (bots) as well as agent-assisted conversations.
Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop
Cisco Finesse integrates traditional contact center functions into a thin-client desktop. It implements a browser-based desktop through a web 2.0 interface. No client-side installations are required.
Cloud Contact Center Software
Cloud contact center software provides cloud-based functionality that was previously only available through on-premise hardware.
Co-Browse
Co-browse provides a shared web browsing experience for agents and customers. Agents or customers can lead the secure session to identify issues, troubleshoot and reach resolutions while collaborating in real-time.
An intuitive console to complete Upstream Works administrative functions in one place with a range of tools to manage, configure and dynamically update.
Contact Center
An extension of the traditional call center, contact centers, in-office or remote, handle communications between an organization and its customers/prospects/members. These communications were previously limited to phone calls but are increasingly taking place on digital channels, including email, web chat, SMS, messaging, social, and more.
Contact Center CRM Integration
Upstream Works solutions can seamlessly integrate to CRM platforms, bringing all customer data into one desktop. Our contact center CRM integrations include Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.
Contact Center Knowledge Base
A contact center knowledge base is a centralized database of dynamic information that can be easily referenced during a customer interaction. Knowledge management tools allow customers and contact center agents to search and access the same database of information, enabling self-service while also empowering agents with knowledge that helps them resolve issues more quickly.
Contact Center Software Integration
Contact center components can include automatic call distributors, integrated voice response units, computer-telephony integration, queue management, and more. Integration of these components is required in order for the contact center to operate effectively and efficiently.
Contact Reason (CR)
All interactions are classified by a contact reason that tells you why a customer contacted. Classification by contact reason provides business information and data about your contact center and your customers.
Contact Reason Detail (CRD)
Contact Reason Detail is the second level of a contact reason. It can be used to provide the outcome or more specific information and data about the reason for a contact.
Context-Data
Having contextual data means having as much information as possible about a person or interaction so that you can personalize the customer experience, tailor offers to the customer, anticipate their needs, and make the interaction more efficient, effortless, and successful.
Context-driven CX
Leveraging all available data to paint a clear picture of the customer experience when referenced with other relevant information. It can take the form of historical interaction data, conversation transcripts, channels used, agents spoken with, and outcomes. It can include contact center data like queue information, agent state, interactions in progress, and SLA adherence. Other relevant data can come from traditional sources like product transactions, financial records, and CSAT surveys. Add digital sources of information like web behavior and social network interactions.
Conversational Data
Our products include a rich set of real-time statistics and historical reports for insights into all the conversational data and information collected by our solutions, across all channels in the contact center.
Customer Assist is a self-service knowledge base that can be accessed by customers through an organization’s website.
Customer Context
Customer context is all of the data and information available an agent has available to support the contact.
Customer Data
Customer experience data provides information needed to make CX better. Connecting all customer data across an organization, including sales, marketing, social media, front office and back office, enables agents to view, manage and optimize the customer experience. When agents have visibility to all customer data, they are empowered to provide personalized, proactive and quick resolutions. The integration and analytics of customer data allows businesses to gain valuable information about customer behaviors and insights into areas for improving customer experience and loyalty.
Customer Experience (CX)
Personalization of the customer experience includes knowing customer preferences, history, transcripts of previous conversations and predictive intelligence to provide relevant offers and identify upsell opportunities.
An effortless customer experience requires channel choice, the convenience of easily switching between preferred channels, not having to repeat information if transferred, and first contact resolution.
Customer Experience Management
Customer Experience Management is the practice of designing, mapping and responding to customer interactions across channels and the entire customer journey to meet or exceed customer expectations and increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and lifetime value.
Customer Interaction
For each contact reason identified, a separate interaction is tracked in the Interaction Activity and Interaction History. Because customers can reach out for more than one reason and agents can service more than one request, multiple interactions can be tracked for each contact.
Customer Journey
The customer journey is comprised of all the interactions and activities that customers experience while engaging with your company and brand.
Customer Journey Analytics
Customer journey analytics is a term for a specific kind of business analysis that concerns a customer “journey” or sequential customer experience across channels and over time. Organizations can leverage Interaction History, customer context, and reporting to understand customer behaviors, identify trends, and facilitate process improvements that enhance the agent and customer experience.
Customer Journey Mapping
The customer journey map is comprised of all the interactions and activities that customers experience while engaging with your company and brand. Instead of looking at a single transaction or event, the customer journey map documents the full customer experience.
Customer Journey Optimization
Customer journey optimization is achieved by mapping and integrating all customer interactions, channels, and data across the enterprise through a single agent desktop.
Customer Portal
An online portal where Upstream Works customers can access on-demand tools, resources and webinars.
Customer Sentiment
Identify connections between customer sentiment, customer behavior, and business results with Upstream Works’ feature rich desktop
Digital Marketing Solutions
Customer Experience (CX) goes beyond the contact center with customers engaging with marketing teams for campaigns and social media exchanges. End to end digital marketing solutions include Selligent and Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Digital Workers
Digital Workers refers to employees within an organization, including the contact center and back-office, that handle customer-related interactions and tasks on digital channels, including email, chat, messaging, social, and more.
Email / Email Channel
Email in the contact center refers to electronic mail exchanged between a customer and an agent. Email features can include subject line parsing, auto-replies, forwarding, Personal Agent Routing (PAR), Last Agent Routing (LAR), dynamic templates, and more.
Enhanced Online Help
Upstream Works Online Help system serves as a single source for core user content and resources.
A knowledge base available to agents to quickly and easily access informative articles that help them better serve customers and increase Fast Contact Resolution (FCR).
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
First Contact Resolution (FCR) is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for contact centers. FCR rates are directly related to customer satisfaction rates. Upstream Works can help you measure FCR across all channels using Contact Reasons with FCR thresholds. Our products provide out-of-the-box First Contact Resolution reports highlighting agents or teams that require training and coaching.
FollowUp
FollowUp is a function in the Upstream Works desktop products that allows agents and supervisors to create tasks that ensure follow-through on customer interactions. This can include sending an email, processing a claim or providing status updates.
Upstream Works solutions connect to existing systems across the enterprise, including Customer Relationship Management (CRMs), business applications and channels, to unify all resources.
Interaction
For each contact reason identified, a separate interaction is tracked in the Interaction Activity and Interaction History. Because customers can contact the organization for more than one reason and agents can service more than one request, multiple interactions can be tracked for each contact.
Interaction Management
For each contact reason identified, a separate interaction is tracked in the Interaction Activity and Interaction History. Because customers can contact the organization for more than one reason and agents can service more than one request, multiple interactions can be tracked for each contact.
Interaction History
Interaction Activity and Interaction History provide full context and easy navigation of past customer interactions across all channels, including transcripts and recordings.
Interceptable Messaging Pipeline
Interceptable Messaging Pipeline Architecture provides a pipeline for all messages with multiple interception points, supporting the sequential integration of third-party plugins to add business intelligence or perform transformations at various points e.g. tag, auto-respond, credit card masking, profanity filers, and more.
Multichannel Contact Center
Multichannel contact centers provide capabilities for communications on email and chat in addition to traditional voice. A precursor to omnichannel contact centers, Multichannel Contact Centers eliminate channel silos and provide a consistent customer experience for any channel.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is AI-powered technology that helps computers and machines better understand and decipher the human language.
Omni AI Hub
The Upstream Works Omni AI Hub is a centralized framework and suite of AI capabilities that power agent assistance with automated summaries, transcription, intent, sentiment, and escalations, and customer self-service across messaging channels.
Omnichannel Agent Desktop
Unlike multichannel agent desktops where channels like phone, email, and chat are supported with different tools and information, an omnichannel agent desktop provides a seamless and consistent experience for both the agent and the customer, and spans every customer communication channel.
Omnichannel Contact Center
Omnichannel contact centers afford organizations the flexibility to set up all communications channels with a consistent set of tools and contact management capabilities. Customer experience improves with CX journey management that enables customers to easily move between channels with continuous, seamless service.
Omnichannel Customer Experience
An omnichannel customer experience may span interactions across a number of different channels and may include elements of self-service as well as agent assistance. The experience is supported with full visibility to context and Interaction History so that as the customer moves between service types and across channels, the customer information and context about their journey moves with them.
Omnichannel Customer Journey
The omnichannel customer journey is comprised of all the interactions and activities that customers experience while engaging with your company and brand, across all channels.
Omnichannel Integration Strategy
Our solutions provide the foundation for a successful omnichannel integration strategy and channel-less experience with KPIs, reports, and analytics for accurate, predictive measurements of channel activity and performance.
Omnichannel Management
Upstream Works provides tools and insights to help enterprise call center management leverage agents and teams for maximum efficiency and better contact center results. Real-time omnichannel visibility, control and historical reports equip management with data to make operational improvements for improved business outcomes.
One Platform
There is no single application that delivers all the functionality required to deliver an optimal agent and customer experience. Instead, organizations can opt for one platform for all interactions and channels that provides a single view into all integrated applications, systems, and databases. This strategy is cost-effective and offers the flexibility required for a changing customer landscape and evolving business needs.
An ‘Outbound’ button on the Single Agent Desktop makes it easy to start a new outbound customer interaction directly from the current customer task.
Partner Portal
An online portal for all Upstream Works partners to access on-demand tools, resources and webinars.
Proactive Chat
Chat can be offered proactively to website visitors based on triggers such as time on page or activity on-page. Tailored, proactive engagements can be made through platforms like Adobe Experience Cloud.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that automates business processes. Organizations can utilize this by configuring the software to capture, interpret and process tasks within a variety of systems.
Screen pop / Application Pop
Through integrations, the agent desktop can automatically display or “pop” screens and applications based on shared enterprise database information. The pop can be triggered by an event or manually achieved with a button-click.
Self-service
Customers are increasingly opting to serve themselves when feasible, through IVR, knowledge portals, and bots.
An intuitive omnichannel desktop and workspace for agents to manage all customer interactions with rich customer data and easy access to knowledge management and business applications and CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
Smart Chat
Part of the Upstream Works Unified Digital Messaging (UDM) set of channels, Smart Chat provides flexible integration with third-party chatbots to provide enhanced self-service with support for rich content like quick-reply buttons, linked images, html pages, calendar pickers, and preconfigured user entry forms.
SMS Messages / SMS Channel
SMS or Short Message Service in the contact center refers to real-time, text-based conversations between a customer and agent using a mobile telephone, fax machine, and/or IP address. In Upstream Works solutions, SMS messages are handled along with chats in the chat gadget for easy multi-contact handling.
Social Care
Monitor and escalate social posts from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more to the contact center.
Social Messages / Social Channels
Social channels in the contact center can include Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, and other social messaging platforms. Messages are queued and allocated based on routing rules configured by the contact center just like other channels.
Supervisor Desktop
The Upstream Works Supervisor Desktop is an intuitive workspace for contact center leaders to help manage agents, teams and queues. It has detailed views of resources and operations to help supervisors leverage information and take quick and proactive action.
Survey Tools
Upstream Works provides native survey capabilities including ratings of chat conversations and integrates with any thirdparty survey tool to measure NPS, CSAT, and more.
Task
In addition to handling incoming contacts, agents can also handle queued or manual tasks. The terms “task” and “contact” are interchangeable in many ways.
Third Party Reporting Platforms
Many customers leverage third party reporting platforms for data manipulation. We provide a schema, set of views, and stored procedures that are readily accessible to management.
Unified Digital Messaging
Unified Digital Messaging (UDM) – Unified Digital Messaging (UDM) allows agents to have multiple messaging interactions on the go with seamless and continuous conversations. Messaging channels include web chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Smart Chat, and Webex Connect channels (SMS, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger).
Upstream Works Desktop (UWD)
The Upstream Works Desktop (UWD) is a desktop for digital workers, including contact center agents and back office customer support advisors.
Upstream Works on Amazon (UWA)
Upstream Works on Amazon Connect (UWA) is an omnichannel cloud contact center solution that seamlessly integrates with Amazon Connect Voice to enhance its capabilities, channels, and integration options. The enterprise contact center software enables better experiences for customers, agents and leadership.
Upstream Works on Finesse (UWF)
Upstream Works on Finesse (UWF) is an omnichannel single agent desktop for all channels and applications within Cisco Finesse and Cisco platforms including UCCE, PCCE, HCS, UCCX, and WCC.
Upstream Works on Finesse (UWF) Standard Historical Reports
Valuable information, details and insights are provided in the UWF Standard Historical Reports including:
Upstream Works on Webex Contact Center (UWW)
Upstream Works on Webex Contact Center (UWW) is an omnichannel cloud contact center solution that enhances Webex contact center with an enterprise-ready, agent-first desktop solution.