ACD
In telecommunication, an automatic call distributor (ACD) is a device that distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals.
Nowadays ACD systems are quite often found in companies who handle a lot of incoming phone-calls and where the caller has no specific need to talk to a certain person, but wants to talk to a random person who is able to talk to him at the earliest opportunity.
Handling incoming calls is the task of the ACD system that consists of hardware for the terminals and phonelines, and software for the routing strategy. The routing strategy is a rule based set of instructions that tells the ACD how calls are handled inside the system. Most of the time this will be a set that determines the best available employee for a certain incoming call. To help make this match, extra variables are taken into account, most often to find out the reason why the customer is calling. Sometimes the caller's Caller ID is used, more often a simple IVR is used to just ask for the reason.
See also
