Erlang C

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What Does Erlang C Mean?

Erlang C is a telephony traffic concept that can be used in
call center management. It is based on the concept of an Erlang, a virtual unit
of telephony that represents a certain workload on a system. In many uses, “Erlang”
refers to a metric involving call minutes.

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Techopedia Explains Erlang C

In Erlang C, planners calculate three factors. One is the number of lines available to intake calls, which are staffed by call-center operators. Another is the number of callers waiting for service. The third piece of the equation is the average time to serve every caller.

Erlang C can be instructive in large-scale call centers and in other virtual telephony environments. Different types of call handling software can deal with delays such as busy signals and dropped calls. Using metrics like Erlang C, call center managers can make these operations as efficient as possible, which can be a big and important part of serving inbound callers in industries such as telecommunications, retail, government services or any place where service takes place by phone.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.