Glossary
Are you confused by how to deliver a great CX, where your VCC is or not sure how to use NLP?
The world of customer experience, customer service and customer relationship management can be confusing, littered with industry jargon, buzz words and acronyms. Our simple glossary can help to explain some of the common words and phrases you might encounter on your digital transformation journey.
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And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, drop us a line and we’ll add it to our Glossary.
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Helping you to understand our industry's jargon
A
Actionable Insights: Information which can be acted on to improve your customer experience.
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Application Programming Interface (API): APIs are a series of definitions and protocols for the development and integration of software, they allow different applications to communicate with each other.
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Artificial Intelligence: A computer programme or machine that can mimic human actions and behaviour. (see Chatbots).
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B
Business To Business (B2B): B2B is a transaction or Interaction between two businesses, as opposed to between a Business and it’s Customer (B2C).
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Business to Customer (B2C): B2C is a transaction or interaction between a business and their customer, rather than between two businesses (B2B).
C
Case Management: Case management is the Process of responding to a customers concern/complaint and being reaching a satisfactory solution for the customer.
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Chatbots: AI (see artificial intelligence) powered customer support channel that can triage cases to the relevant teams.
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Churn Rate: The rate at which your customers stop doing business with your company over a specific period of time.
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Configuration: Amending the software to create and show the fields, layouts, workflows and reports needed by he users.
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Customer Acquisition: The process of a company gaining new customers.
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Customer Data Platform (CDP): Software that combines data from multiple sources to crate a single customer profile that can be used by other systems and software.
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Customer Effort Score (CES): This is a single item metric which measures the amount of effort a customer had to exert to achieve a satisfactory resolution for their issue.
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Customer Experience (CX): Your customers’ impression of your company or brand based on their own experience and interactions with you.
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Customer Experience Strategy: Strategy to manage and improve the operations and process that create the customer experience.
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Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM): A digital identity layer such as fingerprint ID that a company embeds into its customer facing apps, websites etc for customers to verify who they are and to managed what they can access.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: CRM systems are software which help companies manage all of their relationships with their customers in one place. Can be at marketing, sales or customer service level or a combination.
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Customer Self Service (CSS): Tools that let a customer interact online or carry out tasks when and how they want without the need for an agent. For example, FAQs, mobile app and chatbots.
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Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT): A Metric that measures how satisfied your customer was with your product or customer service, usually they respond to a variation of the question “How would your overall satisfaction with the service you received”, ranking their service from 1 (Very Unsatisfied) to 5 (Very Satisfied).
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CX Transformation: Transforming or streamlining processes, technology and behaviour within a business to improve the customer’s interaction at every touchpoint with the company.
D
Data Management Platform (DMP): A DMP is a centralised database which gathers, integrates and handles a large amount of structured and unstructured data.
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Digital Transformation: The process of using new technologies and software to transform the processes of your business and customer experience, to keep up with changing business requirements in the digital age.
E
Employee Engagement: The extent to which an employee feels connected with their company. Good employee engagement will have a positive effect on productivity, work quality, retention and the customer experience.
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Enterprise Consent and Preference Management (ECPM): A platform that allows you to build customer relationships based on transparency. Customers have the ability to control their consent and preference settings.
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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Enterprise resource planning (ERP) refers to a type of software that organisations use to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations.
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F
First Contact Resolution (FCR): FCR is an important contact centre KPI as it shows a company’s ability to address a customer’s enquiry, request or problem at their first interaction.
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Failure Points: Points in a process where failures occur; be it human or process.
G
Gartner Quadrant Systems: Vendors based on Gartner’s standard criteria and methodology.
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Gamification: Turning work into games, to make everyday tasks exciting e.g. by awarding points or offering awards to encourage engagement.
H
Human Capital Management (HCM): Solution management of a companies workforce across areas such as payroll, benefits, administration, workforce planning, expenses, onboarding.
I
Implementation: Execution of delivery of systems and processes.
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Identity Access Management (IAM): This is about workforce identity. It's a set of processes, policies and tools that control user access to system, data and networks in an organisation.
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Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Computerised telephone system that allows the caller to select which service they want via their telephone keypad. The call is then routed to the most appropriate agent. This is often the first thing a caller hears when they reach a contact centre.
J
Journey Mapping: The process of visualising the steps that a customer can take from the initial touchpoint to acquisition of the product to after sales service.
K
Key Performance Indicator (KPI): A KPI is a quantifiable metric used by a company to evaluate its success or an employees success.
L
Live Chat: A form of customer messaging software that allows customers to speak directly with a company representative in real-time, often in customer service or technical support, instead of using chatbots, the phone or, emails etc
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M
Marketing Automation: A function that allows you to automatise and customise digital marketing based on previous statistics and customer data.
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N
National Language Processing (NLP): Technology that allows humans to interact with computers using conversational speech. This is a form of AI technology that enables computers to understand, process and respond to human requests.
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Net Promoter Score (NPS): A customer satisfaction score that helps you to measure how likely your customers are to recommend your products, services or company.
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O
Omni-Channel: A seamless streamlined customer experience across multiple different channels in a unified way to provide one singular experience.
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Onboarding: Training/familiarising clients/agents with new software.
P
Personalisation: Collecting and using customer data to provide a CX that’s tailored to the individual customer’s preferences and requirements.
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Platform as a Service (Paas): Is a cloud computing model where a third party provider delivers a platform as a service to customers over the internet.
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Process Mapping: Technique used to visually describe workflows, the individual steps taken in a process, who is responsible, resources and timelines. This gives a better understanding of how workflows impact a company and customers and helps to create a better customer experience.
Q
Quality Assurance: Process to make sure your services meet the required standards and that an advisors’ performance is consistent, procedures are followed and all documentation maintained effectively.
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R
Retention Rate: The rate of your customers who will continue to pay for a service or repurchase products over a given period of time.
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Return on Investment (ROI): The amount of return you will get for your initial investment in a CRM/CX system.
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Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Automation of manual human tasks done via policies and rules or setting up workflows.
S
Self Service Portal: An online portal which allows customers to perform certain tasks and gain access to information without interacting with an Agent.
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Service Level Agreement (SLA): This outlines the level of service you expect from a vendor/client, outlining the metrics by which this expected level of service will be measured.
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Social Media Scraping/Social Listening: Tracking when your company is mentioned on social media platforms, then performing analysis on this data to gain actionable insights.
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Software as a Service (SaaS): Where the software is hosted centrally and licenced to the customer on a subscription basis. This can also be referred to as 'on-demand software' and web-based or web-hosted software.
T
Touchpoint: The moment in which a customer engages with a brand, whether that be online, over the phone or even in person.
U
User Experience (UX): The overall experience a user has when they interact with a company, its services, systems or products.
V
Virtual Contact Centre (VCC): Where agents operate from different geographical locations rather than being based in a physical location. A VCC can also enable a company to support customers over different time zones.
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Voicebots: Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and National Language Processing (NLP), voicebots are able to understand, qualify and respond to customer requests.
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Voice of the Customer (VoC): The customers feedback about their experiences with your product or service, providing information about the customers needs, expectations and overall satisfaction.
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Voice of the Employee (VoE): The Employees feedback about their working situation, this could be about the software they have to use, their team or even the culture of the workplace. It is important to consult the front line agents when making new technology purchases.
W
Wait Time: How long an inbound caller has to wait for an agent to answer their call.
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Workforce Management (WFM): Optimising employee productivity and competency through processes such as scheduling, forecasting, skills management and to ensure the right employees with the right skillset are available at the right time for the fight task.
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