Glossary
The words you will meet in the interface
The interface uses a number of technical terms. Here is what they mean.
| Word | Means |
|---|---|
| Auto Attendant | Automated answering service. Welcomes the caller and passes the call on. |
| Call Queue | Waiting queue. The call waits here until a member of staff is free. |
| Agent | A member of staff attached to a queue who receives calls from it. |
| DTMF | Key press. When the caller presses a number on the keypad. |
| Overflow | When the queue is full and the call has to be sent elsewhere. |
| Timeout | When a call has waited too long. |
| Operator | The switchboard. Where the call goes if the caller asks for a person. |
| Shared voicemail | A shared answering machine that several people have access to. |
| Presence | Your status in Teams — Online, Busy, Away and so on. |
| Callback | An offer to give up your place in the queue and be called back when your turn comes. Three thresholds must all be met before it is offered. |
| Allow Opt Out | The setting that lets agents opt themselves out of queue calls without leaving the queue. |
| Routing method | The order in which a queue offers the call to its agents: Attendant, Longest Idle, Round Robin or Serial. |
| Agent Alert Time | How long a call is presented to one agent before it moves on to the next. |
| Conference Mode | Whether calls are received in conference mode rather than as an ordinary transfer. |
| Presence-based routing | Only forwards the call to agents whose Teams presence is Online. |
| Unmonitored | What happens when no agents are available. If the action is set to No action, the call is dropped. |
| Hop count | The number of handovers a call made from one menu or queue to the next before it ended. Long chains make callers give up faster. |
| Opt-in ratio | The share of a queue’s agents who are actually signed in to take calls. Twelve agents on paper at 44% opted in is five agents in practice. |
| No agent | Calls that reached a queue when nobody at all was signed in. During opening hours this number should be zero. |
| DDI | Direct Dial-In. A number that reaches a person or function directly, without going through the switchboard. |
| E.164 | The international format for phone numbers: plus, country code, then the number — for example +4512345678. |
| Label | A name you attach to one or more numbers in DDI Manager so everyone can see what they are set aside for. |
| Direct Routing | Connecting your own telephony provider to Teams through a session border controller (SBC). |
| Operator Connect | Buying numbers from an operator that is integrated with Teams, without running your own SBC. |