B

Base Staff. Also called Seated Agents. The minimum number of agents required to achieve service level and response time objectives for given period of time. Seated agent calculations assume that agents will be ñin their seatsî for the entire period of time. Therefore, schedules need to add in extra people to accommodate breaks, absenteeism and other factors that will keep agents from the phones. See Rostered Staff Factor. , always more than a 1:1 ratio with the workload in Erlangs. The base staff is the number of FTEs required before loading factors are taken into account.

Basic Rate Interface (BRI). One of two basic levels of ISDN service. A BRI line provides two bearer channels for voice and data and one channel for signaling (commonly expressed as 2B+D). See Primary Rate Interface (PRI) and Integrated Services Digital Network.

Beep Tone. An audible notification that a call has arrived (also called Zip Tone). Beep tone can also refer to the audible notification that a call is being monitored.

Benchmark. Historically, a term referred to as a standardized task to test the capabilities of devices against each other. In quality terms, benchmarking is comparing products, services and processes with those of other organizations, to identify new ideas and improvement opportunities.

Best in Class. A benchmarking term to identify organizations that outperform all others in a specified category.

Blockage. Callers blocked from entering a queue. See Blocked Call.

Blocked Call. A call that cannot be connected immediately because A) no circuit is available at the time the call arrives, or B) the ACD is programmed to block calls from entering the queue when the queue backs up beyond a defined threshold.

Busy (CDN)
The number of calls given a busy tone when routed to this CDN, due to a setting in the telephone system (Supervisor Control of Queue Size). Calls treated with the busy tone are noted with a B next to the entry in the telephone system data.

Busy (Queue)
An agent is considered Busy when he/she is logged into the telephone system and is engaged on an ACD call, engaged on a Non-ACD call, or in the Not Ready state. An agent is not considered Busy when he/she is in the Waiting state (waiting for an ACD call to be routed to the agent's telephone).

Busy Hour. A telephone traffic engineering term, referring to the hour of time in which a trunk group carries the most traffic during the day. The average busy hour reflects the average over a period of days, such as two weeks. Busy Hour has little use for incoming call centers, which require more specific resource calculation methodologies.

Busy Time
The cumulative amounts of time that an agent in the ACD queue spends in the ACD state, the Not Ready state, or the Non-ACD state. Basically, the total amount of agent position manned time minus the total amount of agent position waiting time.