The terms from customer contact, explained plainly

CSAT

Customer Satisfaction Score

CSAT is the percentage of customers who rate a contact moment as positive. The score is easy to collect and easy to misread.

SLA

Service Level Agreement

An SLA sets out how fast you respond and how often you meet that. The agreement is only worth something when the timer measures what your customer experiences.

First Response Time

First response time

First Response Time measures how long a customer waits for your first substantive answer. Automatic acknowledgements make the number look good without the customer knowing anything.

First Contact Resolution

Resolution on first contact

First Contact Resolution is the percentage of questions finished in one go. Of all customer service numbers, this is the one that predicts the most work.

Average Handling Time

Average handling time

Average Handling Time is the average time an agent spends on a customer question. It's a fine planning number and a poor performance target.

Customer Effort Score

Customer effort score

Customer Effort Score measures how much effort a customer had to make to get helped. It often predicts behaviour better than a satisfaction score.

Customer Experience

Customer experience

Customer Experience is the sum of every moment a customer deals with you. Customer service is a small part of that, and often the part repairing the rest.

NPS

Net Promoter Score

NPS measures whether people recommend you. It's a brand metric, and that makes it unsuitable for steering a customer service team.

Deflection

Deflection is the share of questions that never reached an agent. It's the easiest number to overstate and the most useful to measure honestly.

Contact ratio

Contact ratio is the number of customer questions per order. It's the only number you can't improve by working faster.

Backlog

A backlog is the pile of open questions. The number says little; the age of the oldest says everything.

Abandon rate

Abandonment rate

Abandon rate is the share of customers who drop off before reaching anyone. Those questions don't disappear, they return by email tomorrow.

Quality monitoring

Quality Assurance (QA)

Quality monitoring is reading conversations yourself instead of waiting for customer scores. It's the only measure showing whether the answer was also correct.

Ticket system

A ticket system gives every customer question a number, an owner and a status. That sounds administrative and is exactly what stops questions from getting lost.

Helpdesk

Helpdesk is the collective term for the desk where questions and reports arrive. The term covers both a team and the software, and that confuses matters when choosing.

Ticket routing

Routing of customer questions

Ticket routing determines which question lands with which agent. Set up poorly, it costs you the first twenty minutes of every morning.

Omnichannel

Omnichannel doesn't mean being reachable everywhere. It means a customer who switches channel doesn't have to tell their story again.

Shared inbox

A shared inbox lets a team work in the same mailbox. It works well until questions start running longer than a day.

Live chat

Live chat is a conversation in a window on your own site. The channel lowers the threshold to ask, and that's exactly why volume goes up because of it.

Task management

A task is the work left over after you've answered the customer. That work usually sits in someone's head, and there it's invisible.

Appointments and video calls

Some questions take three days in text and nothing in a fifteen-minute call. The skill is recognising which.

Customer service

Customer service is answering questions your own setup caused. That sounds harsh and it's the most usable definition there is.

Escalation

Escalating is handing a conversation to someone who's allowed more or knows more. The rules for it are usually written nowhere, and you notice that only in the conversations that go wrong.

Canned response

A canned response saves typing on questions that keep returning. It becomes harmful the moment it answers a question that was slightly different.

Queue

A queue is the list of conversations waiting on someone. How you sort that list determines which customers you systematically help too late.

WISMO

Where Is My Order

WISMO is the question of where the order is. It's rarely a location question and nearly always a certainty question, and that difference determines what you can do about it.

Self-service

Self-service is letting the customer arrange themselves what would otherwise be a conversation. It only works when it takes less effort than firing off an email.

AI agent

An AI agent understands a question in plain language, looks up information in your systems and carries out the action behind it. That's something other than a chatbot with choice buttons.

Knowledge base

A knowledge base is the recorded version of what your team knows. Without an owner and a rhythm it's partly wrong within six months.

CRM

Customer Relationship Management

A CRM stores who your customers are and what you agreed with them. The value isn't in the storage but in what comes out of it during a conversation.

Customer data

Customer data is everything you know about a customer. During a conversation only a small part of it counts, and that part has to be there within a second.

Chatbot

A chatbot follows a script. It works as long as the customer stays inside that script, and customers rarely stay inside a script.

Workflow

A workflow is a sequence of steps that runs by itself once something happens. The skill is choosing which steps deserve it.