Customer Support & Experience
Customer support and experience terms describe the full lifecycle of a support interaction — from first contact to resolution and follow-up. This category bridges traditional support operations with modern AI tooling, covering metrics like CSAT and FCR, escalation workflows, omnichannel strategies, and the human-AI collaboration models that define best-in-class support teams. These concepts are essential for anyone building or optimizing a support function.
65 terms in this category
24/7 Support
24/7 support is customer service available continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ensuring customers in any time zone can get help at any time without being constrained by business hours.
After-Call Work
After-call work (ACW) is the administrative tasks an agent completes immediately following a customer interaction — including updating ticket notes, tagging the issue category, scheduling follow-ups, and logging resolutions — before moving to the next contact.
Agent Assist
Agent assist is an AI-powered tool that supports human support agents in real time by suggesting responses, surfacing relevant knowledge base articles, identifying customer intent, and recommending next best actions during live interactions.
Agent Utilization
Agent utilization is the percentage of an agent's working time spent actively handling customer contacts or related work, used to measure workforce efficiency and identify over or under-staffing.
AI Chatbot
An AI chatbot is a software application that uses artificial intelligence — including natural language processing and machine learning — to understand customer messages and generate helpful, contextually appropriate responses in automated conversations.
Automated Response
An automated response is a pre-configured message sent automatically by a support system in response to specific triggers — such as ticket receipt, common queries, or status changes — without requiring human agent involvement.
Average Handle Time
Average Handle Time (AHT) is the mean total time an agent spends on a customer interaction, including talk time, hold time, and after-interaction wrap-up work, used to measure support efficiency.
Callback Request
A callback request is a customer service feature that allows customers to request a phone call from a support agent at a scheduled or next-available time, eliminating hold time while preserving the benefits of phone support.
Canned Response
A canned response is a pre-written reply template stored in a support system that agents can insert into conversations with a single action, enabling consistent, fast responses to frequently asked questions.
Chat Transcript
A chat transcript is the complete written record of a conversation between a customer and a support agent or AI chatbot, preserving the full message exchange for reference, quality review, training, and compliance purposes.
Chatbot Deflection
Chatbot deflection is the process by which an AI chatbot resolves a customer's inquiry completely, preventing the need for human agent involvement and reducing the volume of tickets that reach the support team.
Concurrent Chat
Concurrent chat refers to an agent's ability to handle multiple live chat conversations simultaneously, a key efficiency advantage of chat over phone support that significantly increases agent productivity.
Containment Rate
Containment rate is the percentage of customer interactions initiated with an AI chatbot or automated system that are fully resolved within that system without escalating to a human agent.
Customer Churn
Customer churn is the rate at which customers stop using a product or service within a given period, representing lost revenue and a signal of unmet customer needs.
Customer Effort Score
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort a customer had to expend to resolve an issue or complete a task, using a simple survey question about the ease of their experience.
Customer Experience
Customer experience (CX) is the overall perception a customer forms from every interaction with a brand across the entire customer journey, from first awareness through purchase, onboarding, support, and renewal.
Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is information provided by customers about their experiences with a product, service, or support interaction, gathered through surveys, reviews, ratings, and direct communications to guide business improvement.
Customer Journey
The customer journey is the complete sequence of experiences and touchpoints a customer has with a brand — from initial awareness through purchase, onboarding, usage, support, and renewal — viewed from the customer's perspective.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV) is the total revenue a business expects to earn from a customer throughout the entire duration of their relationship, used to guide acquisition investment and support resource allocation.
Customer Onboarding
Customer onboarding is the structured process of guiding new customers from sign-up to their first meaningful value milestone with a product, combining education, configuration assistance, and proactive support to maximize early product adoption.
Customer Portal
A customer portal is a secure, self-service web interface where customers can access their account information, submit and track support tickets, view billing history, access knowledge base resources, and manage their relationship with a vendor.
Customer Retention
Customer retention is the ability of a business to keep existing customers over a period of time, measured by the percentage of customers who continue their relationship from the start to the end of a defined period.
Customer Satisfaction Score
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a metric that measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, product, or experience, typically collected through a simple post-interaction survey asking customers to rate their satisfaction on a numeric scale.
Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation in support is the practice of grouping customers into categories based on shared characteristics — such as plan tier, company size, industry, or behavior — to deliver differentiated support experiences appropriate to each group.
Customer Success
Customer success is a business function that proactively ensures customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product, combining onboarding, adoption guidance, health monitoring, and retention programs to reduce churn and expand revenue.
Customer Support
Customer support is the set of services and processes an organization provides to help customers successfully use its products or services, resolve issues, and achieve their desired outcomes.
Deflection Rate
Deflection rate is the percentage of potential support contacts that are resolved through self-service, AI chatbots, or automated tools without requiring a human agent, measuring the effectiveness of automated and self-service support.
Email Support
Email support is an asynchronous customer service channel where customers submit issues via email and receive responses from support agents, typically within hours, managed through a shared inbox or help desk ticketing system.
Escalation Management
Escalation management is the set of policies, protocols, and tools that govern when and how support issues are elevated to higher tiers, ensuring urgent or complex cases receive appropriate expert attention without delay.
First Contact Resolution
First contact resolution (FCR) is the percentage of customer support interactions resolved completely during the first contact, without requiring the customer to follow up or the issue to be escalated.
Help Desk
A help desk is a centralized support function — and the software platform that powers it — that manages customer and employee requests, tracks issues through resolution, and enables efficient support operations.
Help Desk Software
Help desk software is a platform that manages customer support operations by centralizing ticket tracking, agent workflows, communication channels, knowledge base, and analytics into a unified system.
Knowledge-Centered Service
Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) is a support methodology where agents capture, structure, and share knowledge as a natural part of their support workflow, building a continuously improving knowledge base from real customer interactions.
Live Chat
Live chat is a real-time text-based communication channel embedded in a website or app that allows customers to get instant assistance from a support agent or AI chatbot without making a phone call or sending an email.
Macro
In customer support, a macro is a predefined action or set of actions that an agent can execute with a single click — updating ticket fields, sending a templated response, adding tags, and changing status — to handle common scenarios efficiently.
Multichannel Support
Multichannel support is the practice of offering customers multiple ways to contact support — such as email, phone, chat, and social media — without necessarily sharing context or history across those channels.
Net Promoter Score
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that asks customers how likely they are to recommend a company to others on a 0-10 scale, classifying them as Promoters, Passives, or Detractors.
Omnichannel Support
Omnichannel support is a customer service approach that delivers a seamless, consistent experience across all contact channels — email, chat, phone, social media, and self-service — with full context preserved as customers move between them.
Phone Support
Phone support is a synchronous customer service channel where customers speak directly with support agents by telephone, offering high-bandwidth, empathetic communication for complex or emotionally sensitive issues.
Priority Support
Priority support is a premium service tier that gives qualifying customers — typically high-value enterprise accounts or premium subscribers — faster response times, dedicated agents, and elevated access to support resources.
Proactive Support
Proactive support is the practice of identifying and addressing potential customer issues before they contact support, using product data, behavioral signals, and automation to deliver help at the right moment.
Quality Assurance
Quality assurance (QA) in customer support is the systematic process of reviewing support interactions against defined standards to ensure consistent, high-quality customer service and identify coaching opportunities.
Reactive Support
Reactive support is the traditional customer service model where the support team responds to issues after customers report them, as opposed to proactive support which anticipates and addresses problems before customers reach out.
Resolution Rate
Resolution rate is the percentage of customer support tickets or interactions that are successfully resolved within a defined period, measuring how effectively a support team closes issues to the customer's satisfaction.
Resolution Time
Resolution time is the total elapsed time from when a customer first contacts support to when their issue is fully resolved, measuring both the efficiency of the support process and the customer's overall wait for a solution.
Response Time
Response time is the elapsed time between a customer submitting a support request and receiving the first substantive reply from a support agent or automated system, a key metric for customer experience and SLA compliance.
Self-Service Rate
Self-service rate measures the percentage of customers who successfully resolve their issues independently through knowledge bases, FAQs, AI chatbots, or other self-service tools without contacting a human agent.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis in customer support uses natural language processing to automatically detect the emotional tone of customer messages — positive, negative, or neutral — enabling prioritization, coaching, and experience improvement.
Service Level Agreement
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a commitment between a support team and its customers (or internal stakeholders) that defines expected response times, resolution times, and other measurable service standards.
Social Media Support
Social media support is customer service delivered through social media platforms such as Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, where customers post questions or complaints publicly and expect timely responses.
Support Analytics
Support analytics is the collection and analysis of operational data from customer support activities — ticket volume, resolution times, satisfaction scores, and agent performance — to drive data-informed decisions and continuous improvement.
Support Costs
Support costs are the total expenses incurred by a customer support operation — including agent salaries, platform licensing, infrastructure, and overhead — used to calculate cost per ticket and measure the financial efficiency of support investments.
Support Knowledge Base
A support knowledge base is a curated repository of help articles, FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and documentation designed to help customers resolve issues independently and help agents find accurate information quickly during support interactions.
Support Persona
A support persona defines the intended personality, tone, communication style, and character of a support team or AI chatbot, ensuring consistent brand-aligned interactions across all agents and automated systems.
Support Queue
A support queue is an ordered list of customer tickets or contacts awaiting agent attention, managed by priority, arrival time, and routing rules to ensure efficient and fair handling of customer requests.
Support Staffing
Support staffing is the process of determining how many support agents to employ and how to schedule them to meet customer demand while maintaining target response and resolution times at acceptable cost.
Support Ticket
A support ticket is a record created in a help desk system that documents a customer's issue or request, tracks its status through resolution, and maintains the complete communication history between the customer and support team.
Support Tiers
Support tiers are distinct levels of customer support organized by complexity and expertise, from tier 1 (front-line agents handling common issues) through higher tiers (specialists and engineers), enabling efficient routing and escalation.
Support Workflow
A support workflow is a defined sequence of steps, decisions, and automations that govern how customer support requests are received, triaged, handled, escalated, and resolved within a support operation.
Ticket Escalation
Ticket escalation is the process of transferring a support issue to a higher-tier agent, specialist, or team when the current handler lacks the authority, expertise, or tools to resolve it.
Ticket Routing
Ticket routing is the process of automatically or manually directing incoming support tickets to the most appropriate agent, team, or queue based on rules such as issue type, customer tier, language, or agent expertise.
Ticketing System
A ticketing system is software that creates, assigns, tracks, and manages customer support requests from initial contact through resolution, providing a structured workflow and audit trail for every issue.
Triage
Triage in customer support is the initial assessment and prioritization of incoming tickets or contacts based on urgency, complexity, and customer impact, directing each request to the appropriate resource for the most efficient resolution.
Voice of Customer
Voice of Customer (VoC) is a research process that captures customers' expectations, preferences, and aversions to provide qualitative and quantitative insights that drive product, service, and experience improvements.
Warm Transfer
A warm transfer is a support handoff where the transferring agent introduces the customer to the receiving agent, provides context about the issue, and confirms the receiving agent is ready before completing the transfer.