- This article is about automatic call distributors. For other uses of the term ACD, see ACD (disambiguation).
In telephony, an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) is a device that distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals that agents use. It is often part of a computer telephony integration system.
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 person who is able to talk to him at the earliest opportunity.
Routing incoming calls is the task of the ACD system. The system consists of hardware for the terminals and switches, 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 or ANI is used, more often a simple IVR is used to just ask for the reason.
ACD servers can cost anywhere between a few thousand dollars to close to the millions of dollars for a very large call center handling thousands of calls per day.
See also