Short for the metric prefix "kilo," meaning thousand. If you make 50K a year, you make $50,000. In computerese, K is equal to 1024. This is because computers work in base 2, and 1024 is a power of 2. One kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes.

K is also used by some telecom types to refer to a K-style handset.

A telephone handset either has a square mouthpiece and earpiece or round ones. Newer phones, as a rule, have the square handsets, called K-style. (The round kind is called G-style.) If your headset dealer asks you if you have an electronic or carbon-based microphone in your telephone, your first clue to answering this question is the shape of your telephone mouthpiece. If it is square, chances are excellent the phone has an electronic microphone. If it is round, it's carbon-based. Be warned, while the round mouthpieces screw off, the square kind don't come off at all.

The physical button on a telephone set. What normal people call a "switch," as in on and off switch, telephone people call a "key." A collection of telephone keys is found on a keypad.

Those statistics (and other factors) that are determined to be most important to figuring out how good a job one of your agents is doing. The same or other KPIs can be used to figure out how well...