Customer Service

59 Customer Service Terms & Glossary

Josh Spilker

October 8, 2024

Whether you’re scaling a support team, refining your processes, or simply looking to improve customer satisfaction, mastering key customer service terms can help you stay ahead. In this guide, we’ll break down essential terminology, from ticket deflection to user experience (UX), so you can optimize your approach and ensure every interaction leaves a lasting positive impression.

Agent Empowerment

Agent empowerment refers to the practice of giving customer service representatives the authority, tools, and information they need to make decisions that improve customer interactions. 

In customer service, empowering agents is crucial as it enhances their ability to resolve issues quickly and effectively, leading to higher job satisfaction and improved customer experiences. 

Empowered agents are more likely to take initiative and provide personalized solutions, fostering a positive environment and stronger customer relationships.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in customer service encompasses the use of chatbots, virtual assistants, machine learning algorithms, and natural language processing to automate and enhance customer interactions. AI can handle routine inquiries without human intervention, freeing up agents to tackle more complex issues. It’s important for teams because it can significantly improve response times, accuracy, and 24/7 availability, leading to higher customer satisfaction. Moreover, AI can analyze vast amounts of data to provide insights into customer behavior and preferences, helping teams personalize their service and anticipate needs.

Behavioral Analytics

Behavioral analytics involves analyzing data about how customers behave to better understand their preferences and predict future actions. 

In customer service, utilizing behavioral analytics can significantly enhance personalization and customer engagement by tailoring interactions and solutions to individual customer needs. 

This approach helps in optimizing the customer journey and improving satisfaction by proactively addressing potential issues and offering relevant opportunities.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) involves hiring external companies to manage various business-related operations, such as customer service, human resources, or accounting. 

This practice allows organizations to focus on core business functions, improve service levels, and reduce costs. In customer service, BPO can help manage large volumes of customer interactions efficiently, ensuring expertise and scalability.

Chatbots

Chatbots are automated messaging software that use AI to mimic conversation with users. They are valuable in customer service for handling basic inquiries 24/7, reducing wait times and freeing up human agents for more complex issues. Effective chatbots can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Churn Rate

Churn rate measures the percentage of customers who discontinue their subscriptions or stop using a service within a certain period. It is a critical metric for businesses to understand and mitigate to improve customer retention.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a strategy and technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with current and potential customers. 

It helps businesses streamline processes, build customer relationships, increase sales, improve customer service, and increase profitability. 

By centralizing customer information, CRM systems make it easier for companies to provide a personalized and consistent customer experience across all touchpoints.

Cross Selling

Cross-selling involves offering related products or services to an existing customer. When done effectively as part of customer service, it can enhance the customer experience by providing added value and increasing overall sales.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is a key performance indicator that measures customer satisfaction with a service, product, or experience. It is typically obtained through a survey that asks customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale, often from 1 to 5. 

CSAT scores are used to gauge the effectiveness of customer service teams, identify areas for improvement, and understand overall customer sentiment. 

High CSAT scores indicate that customers are satisfied, which can lead to increased loyalty and positive word-of-mouth referrals.

Customer Advocacy

Customer advocacy is a customer service approach where companies focus on what is best for the customer, potentially leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. Advocates promote products and services to other potential customers, often in a very organic way.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is the process of actively building, nurturing, and managing relationships with customers, encouraging ongoing interaction and loyalty. 

In customer service, high levels of engagement can lead to enhanced customer loyalty, increased sales, and positive word-of-mouth. 

Effective customer engagement strategies ensure customers have consistent, positive interactions with the brand, increasing their commitment and overall lifetime value.

Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM)

CEM or CXM (Customer Experience Management) is the practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. 

This strategic approach focuses on the overall customer journey across multiple touchpoints and channels, aiming to create positive experiences that drive brand loyalty and value.

Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is information provided by customers about their experience with a company’s products or services. This feedback is crucial for continuous improvement and helps companies adapt their offerings to meet customer needs and preferences better.

Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping involves creating a visual representation of the customer’s experiences with a service or product across multiple touchpoints. This tool is critical for identifying pain points and opportunities, ensuring that every part of the customer interaction is optimized for satisfaction and efficiency.

Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle encompasses all the stages a customer goes through with a company, from initial awareness and acquisition, through engagement and purchase, to retention and advocacy. This concept helps businesses strategize their marketing and service efforts.

Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is the process of getting new customers acquainted with a product or service. Effective onboarding can significantly impact customer satisfaction and retention by ensuring customers understand how to get the most out of their purchase from the start.

Customer Retention

Customer retention measures the ability of a company to keep its customers over time. Effective customer service plays a critical role in retention by resolving issues efficiently and ensuring a positive ongoing relationship. Higher retention rates lead to increased profitability.

Customer Success

Customer success focuses on proactively ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using a product or service. Unlike traditional customer support, which reacts to issues as they arise, customer success aims to prevent problems before they occur.

This concept is vital because it shifts the focus from mere transactional interactions to building long-term relationships. For teams, implementing customer success strategies involves understanding customer goals, offering tailored advice, and monitoring usage patterns to intervene when necessary. This approach can significantly increase customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value.

Escalation
Escalation refers to the process of directing customer issues that cannot be resolved at the initial level of support to higher levels of authority. This is vital for resolving complex issues efficiently and maintaining customer satisfaction.

Escalation Management

Escalation management is the process by which customer service teams manage issues that require higher-level intervention beyond the initial support provided. 

This process is vital in customer service to ensure complex or urgent issues are quickly directed to the right expertise or authority level, ensuring customer satisfaction and problem resolution. 

Effective escalation management helps maintain trust and reliability in the company’s support structure.

Feedback Loop

A feedback loop is a system established to continuously collect, analyze, and respond to customer feedback. 

In customer service, creating effective feedback loops is essential for continuous improvement, enabling organizations to adapt their products, services, and interactions based on direct customer insights. 

This responsiveness to customer needs not only improves the product quality but also strengthens customer relationships.

First Contact Resolution

First Contact Resolution refers to solving a customer’s issue during the first interaction, without the need for follow-up. High FCR rates are often associated with greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, as customers appreciate quick and effective solutions to their problems.

Help Desk Software
A help desk is a resource designed to provide customers or employees with information and support related to a company’s products or services. It primarily focuses on resolving technical problems, answering queries, and offering solutions in a timely manner. 

Help desks are crucial in maintaining customer satisfaction by ensuring users receive immediate assistance and support, often through various channels such as phone, email, or live chat. 

This service can significantly enhance user experience by minimizing downtime and facilitating efficient problem resolution.

Hyper-Personalization

Hyper-personalization is an advanced approach to personalization that uses real-time data and artificial intelligence to deliver extremely relevant and tailored content, products, or services to each customer. 

In customer service, hyper-personalization can significantly enhance the customer experience by making interactions more relevant and meaningful, thereby increasing engagement and satisfaction.

Integrated Customer Experience

An integrated customer experience involves seamlessly connecting all aspects of a customer’s interaction with a company, ensuring consistent and cohesive experiences across all channels and touchpoints. 

This approach is crucial in customer service as it helps eliminate any disconnects between different service channels, enhancing overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Interaction History

Interaction history refers to the comprehensive record of all past communications and transactions a customer has with a company. This includes every inquiry, purchase, complaint, and interaction across various channels such as phone, email, social media, and live chat. 

Maintaining detailed interaction history is crucial for providing personalized and effective customer service. It allows customer service representatives to quickly understand a customer’s issues and preferences, leading to faster resolution times and a more customized service experience.

Issue Resolution

Issue resolution refers to the process of addressing and solving a customer’s problem or complaint effectively and efficiently.

In customer service, successful issue resolution is crucial as it directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty. This process typically involves identifying the problem, investigating the cause, proposing solutions, and following up to ensure the issue is fully resolved. 

Effective issue resolution often requires coordinated efforts across various departments within an organization to provide a comprehensive solution that meets the customer’s needs and expectations. 

Prioritizing quick and thorough issue resolution helps maintain a positive reputation and encourages long-term customer relationships.

Journey Analytics

Journey analytics is the use of data to analyze and understand the paths customers take across multiple channels and touchpoints with a brand. 

In customer service, journey analytics provides insights into customer behaviors and preferences, identifying critical moments where intervention can enhance the customer experience or where improvements are necessary.

Knowledge Base Optimization

Knowledge base optimization involves regularly updating and refining a repository of information that customers and service agents use to answer queries and solve problems. 

In customer service, an optimized knowledge base is crucial for providing quick and accurate self-service options to customers, reducing the workload on live agents and increasing overall service efficiency.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. In customer service, effective knowledge management helps ensure that all customer-facing agents have accurate and up-to-date information to help customers efficiently.

Live Chat Optimization

Live chat optimization involves enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of live chat interactions to ensure fast, accurate, and satisfying customer service. 

This includes streamlining response times, improving the quality of interactions, and integrating real-time support tools to enhance the customer experience.

Mobile Customer Support
Mobile customer support refers to the optimization of customer service functions to be accessible and fully operational on mobile devices.
Given the prevalence of smartphones, providing effective mobile support ensures that customers can seek help and find information easily from their mobile devices, enhancing accessibility and satisfaction.

Multilingual Support
Multilingual support involves offering customer service in several languages. This is essential for global businesses as it ensures that non-English speaking customers receive help in their native language, improving overall customer experience and satisfaction.

Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score is a metric that gauges customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking customers how likely they are to recommend a company’s product or service to others. NPS helps companies understand customer sentiment and predict business growth, making it a valuable tool for measuring customer service success.

Omnichannel
Omnichannel refers to a seamless and integrated approach to customer service that connects all channels a company uses to communicate with customers—such as email, phone, web, social media, and in-person interactions—into a cohesive experience.
This strategy ensures that customers receive consistent service regardless of how or where they choose to interact with a company. Omnichannel service and support is crucial for modern businesses as it meets customers’ expectations for accessible, efficient, and integrated support across all platforms.

Omnichannel Support
Omnichannel support is a customer service strategy that provides a seamless customer experience across multiple channels, including email, phone, live chat, social media, and self-service portals.
It ensures consistency in service, regardless of the channel, which enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. For customer service and support teams, mastering omnichannel support means breaking down silos between different communication methods and ensuring information flows freely, enabling more effective and efficient customer interactions.

Operation Efficiency
Operational efficiency in customer service refers to the ability to deliver the highest level of service in the most cost-effective way.
This includes optimizing processes, minimizing waste, and leveraging technology to improve service delivery and customer satisfaction.

Pain Point
A pain point is a specific problem that customers face during their interaction with a product or service. Identifying and resolving pain points is essential for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Personalization
Personalization in customer service refers to tailoring interactions, communications, and solutions to the individual needs and preferences of each customer.
This approach is important because it makes customers feel valued and understood, which enhances their experience and satisfaction. For service and support teams, personalization involves using customer data to customize interactions, from addressing the customer by name to suggesting solutions based on their history and preferences. Effective personalization can lead to increased customer engagement, loyalty, and advocacy.

Predictive Customer Service
Predictive customer service uses analytics, data mining, and machine learning techniques to anticipate customer needs, preferences, and potential issues before they manifest.
This proactive approach allows companies to deliver personalized services and resolve problems before they affect the customer, enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.

Proactive Support
Proactive support involves anticipating and addressing customer issues before they arise or escalate.
In customer service, proactive support can include sending out alerts about potential issues, providing regular updates, and offering guidance that might prevent future difficulties.
This approach not only enhances the customer experience but also reduces the burden on support teams by decreasing the volume of incoming queries.

Queue Time
Queue time refers to the duration a customer spends waiting to be attended to by customer service after initiating contact. This metric is crucial as it directly impacts customer satisfaction and perception of a company’s efficiency.
In customer service, minimizing queue time is a priority because prolonged waiting can lead to frustration and a negative customer experience.

Efficient management of queue times involves optimizing resource allocation, using automated systems for initial responses, and ensuring that support teams are adequately staffed to handle the incoming queries swiftly.

Reducing queue times enhances customer satisfaction and improves overall service quality.

Quality Assurance
Quality assurance in customer service involves monitoring and improving the service provided to customers to ensure it meets or exceeds quality standards.
This includes regular training of staff, monitoring of interactions, and feedback mechanisms to continuously enhance the quality of service.

Reactive Support
Reactive support is the traditional approach to customer service, where action is taken only after a customer reports an issue.
This method requires organizations to efficiently handle and resolve customer complaints and queries as they arise. In customer service, reactive support involves providing solutions and assistance in response to direct requests, ensuring issues are addressed promptly and effectively.
Focusing on swift and accurate issue resolution helps maintain customer satisfaction and trust in the brand.

Resolution Rate
Resolution rate measures the percentage of customer issues that are resolved within the first interaction or contact with customer service.
This key performance indicator is essential for assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of a support team. In customer service, a high resolution rate indicates that problems are being addressed quickly and thoroughly, leading to increased customer satisfaction and reduced follow-up contacts.
Strategies to improve resolution rate include training staff, enhancing knowledge resources, and implementing advanced support technologies.

Response Time
Response time measures how quickly a company replies to customer inquiries.
Faster response times can improve customer satisfaction as customers value quick replies and feel their concerns are being addressed promptly.

Self-Service Tools
Self-service tools, such as FAQs, knowledge bases, forums, and interactive tutorials, empower customers to find answers and solve problems on their own.
These resources are crucial for modern customer service strategies because they cater to the customer’s preference for quick and easy access to information.
For teams, developing comprehensive and user-friendly self-service options can reduce the volume of routine support requests, allowing agents to focus on more complex inquiries. Additionally, self-service tools can be an essential part of an omnichannel strategy, ensuring consistent information across all channels.

Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis involves the use of natural language processing, text analysis, and computational linguistics to identify and extract subjective information from customer interactions.
This technique allows organizations to understand customer emotions and opinions towards their products or services.
In customer service, sentiment analysis helps identify trends and sentiments in feedback, enabling companies to adjust their strategies and improve customer experience based on real emotions and expressed feelings.

Service Desk
A service desk is a comprehensive resource that provides end users with information and support related to company processes, IT services, or other needs.
Unlike a traditional help desk, which typically focuses on resolving technical issues, a service desk has a broader scope that includes managing all types of service processes.
In customer service, the service desk is integral to ensuring that user issues are resolved quickly and efficiently, contributing to overall business effectiveness and user satisfaction.

Service Level Agreement
A Service Level Agreement is a contract between a service provider and the customer that defines the level of service expected during the relationship.
SLAs are important because they set clear expectations for both parties and provide a benchmark for service quality.

Synchronous & Asynchronous Support
Synchronous support refers to real-time interactions, such as phone calls or live chats, where the customer and the service agent communicate instantly.
Asynchronous support, on the other hand, includes methods like emails or support tickets, where responses do not occur in real-time.
In customer service, both forms of support are crucial as they cater to different customer needs and preferences, ensuring flexibility and convenience in how support is delivered.

Ticket Deflection
Ticket deflection refers to strategies used to reduce the number of support tickets by guiding customers towards self-help resources before they contact support.
This approach helps organizations manage their workload and reduce costs by empowering customers to resolve common issues on their own.
In customer service, effective ticket deflection can improve overall service efficiency and customer satisfaction by providing quick answers to common questions through FAQs, knowledge bases, and automated tools.

Ticketing System
A ticketing system is a software application that records and manages customer service requests.
It helps customer service teams track interactions with customers, manage inquiries more efficiently, and ensure issues are resolved in a timely manner.

Touchpoint
A touchpoint refers to any interaction or point of contact between a customer and a company, whether it’s through communication, a product, or a service.
Managing touchpoints effectively is critical for creating a seamless customer experience.

Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting is a systematic process of diagnosing the root cause of a problem and then resolving it.
In customer service, troubleshooting is a critical skill for resolving technical issues, often involving a step-by-step approach to identify the problem and implement solutions.
Effective troubleshooting improves resolution times and enhances customer confidence in the ability to resolve their issues swiftly and accurately.

Upselling
Upselling is the practice of encouraging customers to purchase a higher-end product than the one in question.
It is a strategy used to increase revenue per customer, which can also be framed as offering the customer a product that better meets their needs.

User Experience (UX)
User Experience (UX) refers to all aspects of a user’s interaction with a company’s products or services, focusing on enhancing customer satisfaction and usability.
In customer service, UX plays a vital role in designing processes and interfaces that are user-friendly and meet the needs of customers.
Good UX practices ensure that the customer’s journey through any service or product is smooth, enjoyable, and fulfilling, thereby enhancing overall satisfaction and loyalty.

Voice of the Customer (VoC)
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a term that describes the process of capturing customers’ expectations, preferences, and aversions.
This comprehensive feedback is crucial for guiding business decisions and improving products and services.
In customer service, VoC programs involve collecting and analyzing customer feedback to better understand their needs and improve service offerings, thereby directly influencing customer satisfaction and retention.

Workflow Automation
Workflow automation involves the use of software to automate complex business processes, reducing the need for manual input and increasing operational efficiency.
In customer service, workflow automation can streamline processes such as ticket routing, data entry, and follow-up tasks, allowing customer service teams to focus more on providing high-quality personal interactions and less on repetitive tasks.

This leads to faster service delivery and improved customer experiences.

Try Supportman and Tettra for your customer service team.