Glossary

A core telephony system within a call centre, which provides connections between the public telephone network and the call centre agents’ telephones. It includes call queuing functionality to ensure calls are handled in sequence.

A mechanism allowing two different IT systems to communicate with each other, share information and share functionality.

A system used to record phone calls between ‘callers’ (customers, prospects) and call centre agents. These call recording systems may record all calls or just a selection of calls and are often used for training or quality purposes.

CIFAS is the UK’s fraud prevention service, with many members spread across banking, credit cards, asset finance, retail credit, mail order, insurance, savings and investments, telecommunications, factoring, and share dealing

Often referred to as ‘traditional’ telephony, this describes the technological design of a telephone system or network. E1 and T1 are examples of the types of phone lines available. T1 is the North American and Japanese standard, and E1 is the standard for Europe and other countries.

Checks can be carried out on prospective new employees by the Criminal Records Bureau – and this is recommended if your staff will have access to payment data.

In the context of Semafone solutions, we use CRM to include any software application used by the call centre agent during the call. In many cases there may be multiple systems used during the call.

The CVV number consists of the rightmost three digits printed on the signature strip on the reverse of Visa and MasterCard credit cards.

The CVV code is a security feature for "card not present" transactions (e.g. Internet transactions), and now appears on most major credit and debit cards. This new feature is a three or four-digit code, which provides a cryptographic check of the information embossed on the card.

The CVV code helps ascertain that the customer placing the order actually possesses the credit/debit card and that the card account is legitimate. Each credit card company has its own name for the CVV code, but it functions the same for all major card types. (VISA refers to the code as CVV2, MasterCard calls it CVC2, and American Express calls it CID).

The back panel of most Visa/MasterCard cards contain the last four digits of the account number followed by the CVV code. When you submit your credit card information your data is protected by Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology certified by a digital certificate.

DSP stands for Digital Signal Processing and is the basis of many areas of technology, from mobile phones to modems and multimedia PCs.

DTMF is the generic term for touch-tone (which is a registered trademark of ATT). Your touch-tone® phone is technically a DTMF generator that produces DTMF tones as you press the buttons.

When you press the buttons on the keypad, a connection is made that generates two tones at the same time - a "Row" tone and a "Column" tone. These two tones identify the key you pressed to any equipment you are communicating with.

The Financial Services Authority is an independent non-governmental body, given statutory powers by the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. A company limited by guarantee and financed by the financial services industry. The Treasury appoints the FSA Board, which currently consists of a chairman, a chief executive officer, three managing directors, and 9 non-executive directors. This Board sets the overall policy, but day-to-day decisions and management of the staff are the responsibility of the Executive.

An IVR is a telephony system in which a person uses a touch-tone telephone to interact with a database to acquire information or to enter data into the database. IVR technology does not require human interaction over the telephone, as the user's interaction with the database is predetermined by what the IVR system will allow the user access to.

For example, banks and credit card companies use IVR systems so that their customers can receive up-to-date account information instantly and easily without having to speak directly to a person. IVR technology is also used to gather information, as in the case of telephone surveys in which the user is prompted to answer questions by pushing the numbers on a touch-tone telephone.

Number code of 14 or 16 digits embossed on a bank or credit card and encoded in the card's magnetic strip. PAN identifies the issuer of the card and the account, and includes a check digit as an authentication device.

PCI DSS is a widely accepted set of policies and procedures intended to optimise the security of credit, debit and cash card transactions and protect cardholders against misuse of their personal information. The PCI DSS was created jointly in 2004 by four major credit-card companies: Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express.

This is a secret number used to verify identity and access secure accounts.

This refers to the phone company providing the call centre with their incoming telephone lines.

A QSA is a qualified assessor able to accredit organisations with the PCI QSA certification. The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) designation is conferred by the PCI Security Standards Council <link to https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/index.shtml> to those individuals that meet specific information security education requirements, have taken the appropriate training from the PCI Security Standards Council, are employees of an approved PCI security and auditing firm <link to: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/pdfs/pci_qsa_list.pdf> and will be performing PCI compliance assessments. The term QSA may also be implied to identify an individual qualified to perform PCI compliance auditing and consulting.

In SecureMode Semafone splits the call into two halves: voice and DTMF. This allows the voice traffic to continue as normal, whilst allowing Semafone to collect the sensitive information. Semafone will mask outgoing DTMF tones so that the agent and call recording equipment cannot detect which key is being pressed by the caller. Once all the sensitive information has been collected, Semafone will automatically turn off SecureMode and allow DTMF through as normal once again.

A Services Oriented Architecture is a technology and approach adopted by many organisations to facilitate easy integration between IT systems. Automated business processes are made available as ‘services’ allowing new systems and business functionality to be deployed more quickly.

TCP/IP is the basic communication language or protocol of the Internet. It can also be used as a communications protocol in a private network (either an intranet or an extranet). When you are set up with direct access to the Internet, your computer is provided with a copy of the TCP/IP program just as every other computer that you may send messages to or get information from also has a copy of TCP/IP.

TDM is the process of dividing up one communication time slot into smaller time slots. We will use the example of a T1, which is time-division multiplexed at the DS1 rate. A T1 consists of 24 channels, which are read 8,000 times per second. Each time a channel is read, a value is obtained. Thus, a time slot for a T1 is 1/8,000th of a second. Time-division multiplexing combines the values from all 24 channels on the T1 into the same 1/8,000th of a second.

VoIP describes the design of a phone network (public or private) that carries telephone conversations over a data network. VoIP is rapidly overtaking Circuit Switched as the preferred method of building enterprise and public telephone networks.

SIP allows telephony systems conforming to that standard to communicate over VoIP networks.

XML is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. For example, computer manufacturers might agree on a standard or common way to describe the information about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, and so forth) and then describe the product information format with XML.