Customer Service Terms Every CX Representative Should Know

A customer emails: “Your chatbot told me one thing, your agent said another, and your manager gave me a third answer.” Sound familiar?

According to a report by PwC, 32% of customers abandon brands after just one bad experience—which means that communication chaos isn’t just frustrating—it’s expensive. And the difference between consistent service and lost sales can be as simple as your customer service team speaking the same language.

Training your customer service team to use customer service terms strategically will help you better communicate, measure performance, and deliver consistent, high-quality support. 

General customer service terms

• Agent
• Call center
• Customer experience (CX)
• Customer segments
• Customer success
• Customer support
• Service-level agreement (SLA)
• Subject-matter expert (SME)
• Service recovery
• Support ticket

While customer support isn’t one-size-fits-all, most companies follow a general framework for success. The below important customer service terms capture several different ways to structure and describe your customer support team:

Agent

A customer support agent is typically the first contact point when a customer messages, emails, or calls your brand. This makes them responsible for setting the tone of customer interactions. Think of them as your brand ambassadors—their words directly impact whether that customer makes another purchase. An agent must complete a wide range of tasks, including answering customer inquiries, routing customers to the correct departments, and solving various logistical puzzles to guarantee customer satisfaction. 

Call center

A call center is essentially the information epicenter of a customer support department. Teams of managers, agents, and other support professionals record customer feedback and offer helpful solutions to challenging customer inquiries. 

Similarly, a help desk can refer to both a physical or digital destination for customer support, as well as a hybrid hub for both types of assistance. Whether it’s a call center with a customer support team, an online system, or something in between, the purpose is the same: organizing and responding to customer needs efficiently. 

Help desk software centralizes emails, voicemails, chats, and other vital information from ongoing customer interactions, making it easier for support teams to track issues and deliver timely solutions. 

Pro tip: Look for help desk tools that integrate with your ecommerce platform to see customer purchase history alongside support tickets.

Customer experience (CX)

Customer experience is a consumer’s holistic interpretation of all interactions with a business. Every touchpoint—from your website’s loading speed to your return policy—shapes CX. Every member of the support team must strive to ensure that every exchange (in-person, online, or over the phone) exceeds customer expectations to maintain a consistently high CX.

Customer segments

Customer segments are consumer categories, divided into demographics such as age, gender, and other various characteristics. Customer segmentation can help companies improve their customer experience strategies by developing personalized communications for recurrent customer interactions, questions, and scenarios. For example, businesses can create segments like “first-time buyers,” “VIP customers,” or “at-risk churners” to personalize their support approach.

Customer success

Customer success is a proactive approach in which a business provides exceptional service before an incident happens. It does so by engaging with customer queries across all channels (i.e., contact forms, social media, online reviews, etc.) and solidifying customer loyalty by going above and beyond at every stage of the consumer journey. 

Think of it as relationship management with a revenue focus—successful customer success teams directly impact repeat purchase rates and lifetime value. Customer success may also refer to a type of role or department that focuses on customer care and tracks customer success metrics. 

Customer support

Customer support is an umbrella term for receiving and solving customer questions, feedback, or complaints. Depending on your business size, everyone may play a role in customer support, or you may have a dedicated department. An excellent support team directly translates to improved customer retention because consumers are more likely to return or recommend a business to friends and family when they feel like a priority.

Service-level agreement (SLA)

Your service-level agreement (SLA) is your team’s promise to customers—like “We’ll respond to emails within two hours” or “Chat support available 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.” Break the promise? Your SLA spells out what happens next, like refunds or credits, if you fall short of customer expectations. 

These agreements may detail the maximum wait time to resolve customer queries, a minimum survey score, or any other metric that directly impacts customer satisfaction. 

Subject-matter expert (SME)

A SME is a customer service agent with sufficient technical expertise to address highly specialized customer inquiries. Any proactive support team should have subject-matter experts on staff who possess a deep knowledge of a company’s products and services. 

Service recovery

Service recovery is a paradox in customer relationship management when existing customers become more loyal after a service team helps them resolve a concern. This concept highlights how quality service can help a company far beyond simply eliminating customer issues. 

Support ticket

Customer service teams use support tickets as the primary vehicle for driving customer queries to a solution. These digital records are often tracked by a help desk using a customer support software to catalogue every step of the problem-solving process, from initial contact to follow-up communication. 

Customer support teams are often inundated with support tickets and must develop a plan to categorize customer interactions by level of importance. Tiered support systems are designed in many different ways: Some systems prioritize loyal customers first, others escalate the most complex or urgent issues to the top, and many use a combination of both strategies.

Customer service tactics

• Escalation management
• Feedback loop
• Issue tracking
• Quality assurance
• Self-serve solutions
• Ticket routing
• Outsourcing

An exceptional customer service philosophy is only as good as the actions support team members take to ensure that every customer journey meets those expectations. The following customer service terminology can encourage everyone to walk the walk when it comes to customer support:

Escalation management

Some customer interactions require more care than others. Escalation management is a system that allocates the proper resources and channels to resolve customer queries as quickly and efficiently as possible, such as creating a tiered support system. 

Feedback loop

An essential component of any successful customer service philosophy is understanding customer satisfaction with the process. The main goal of a feedback loop is to collect customer feedback, identify areas for improvement, and implement corrective measures for better service.

Issue tracking

Issue tracker software is a helpful tool for mapping out various phases of a customer support issue. Few things can erode customer loyalty faster than consumers feeling that their problems with a product or service don’t matter to the brand. Using an issue tracker helps customer service teams stay informed about all discussions and completed tasks, so customers don’t need to repeat themselves along the way. 

Quality assurance

Quality assurance is an ongoing exercise that ensures a support team provides an acceptable standard of customer satisfaction. QA teams often record, replay, and review emails and calls to improve interactions and guarantee a consistently positive customer experience. 

Self-service solutions

Self-service tools—such as FAQ pages, blog posts with troubleshooting tips, and product manuals—empower customers to easily find answers to their own questions. Encouraging customers to use self-service tools first allows your team to focus human resources on more challenging or complex issues.

Ticket routing

This resource-allocation process ensures that each customer support ticket is assigned to the available service professional who is most equipped to solve the issue.

Outsourcing

In customer service terms, outsourcing typically refers to using a call center based in another country. This is one of the most common forms of business process outsourcing. However, it is becoming less common with advanced AI language models available as an alternative. 

Customer service channels

Today’s consumers desire a wide range of options with their products and services. Offering various customer service channels allows them to find solutions to issues in a way that best fits their schedules, problem-solving styles, and personal preferences. Brands often use multiple channels to communicate and coordinate with customers, such as:

• Chatbots. Chatbots are conversational tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that enhance the speed and availability of customer service operations. While AI has made significant improvements in language formation—making it more conversational than the typical canned response you may get from an automated answering machine—they are not necessarily designed to take the place of human customer service agents. 

• Customer relationship management (CRM). This term refers to both the customer support software that companies use to analyze customer interaction data (a CRM), as well as the strategies they implement to build lasting customer relationships. 

• Customer portals. A customer portal is one of the primary channels where a buyer can access all self-service resources that a service provider offers. Customers can find their purchase history, initiate returns, and perform many functions typically reserved for customer service agents. 

• Interactive voice response (IVR) software. IVR technology provides a canned response on customer service phone lines to direct customers to the appropriate channel for resolution (i.e., “Press 3 for returns”), allowing call center representatives to focus on specialized questions. 

• Live chat options. This channel links customers to real, knowledgeable customer service representatives to clients to resolve customer feedback issues. Live chats require more resources, but often produce better results as customer questions are answered by a human, rather than receiving a canned response from a chatbot. 

Customer service metrics and KPIs 

Customer support is a constantly evolving social science that requires detailed customer data and flexible resolution strategies to provide a positive customer experience. Even though customer service is dynamic, these key performance indicators (KPIs) can help tell the real story of your customer service performance—and predict your revenue.

The following customer service terms describe standard metrics of success in the customer support field:

• Benchmarking. Benchmarking is the process of measuring business performance against competitors and high-performing companies in or outside of your market. Customer service representatives often use benchmarking to compare how their customer experience compares to other companies. 
• Average resolution time (ART). This metric considers the amount of time a customer support team spends solving customer inquiries and completing an average customer journey. This temporal expenditure directly impacts a company’s customer effort score (CES) and overall customer satisfaction.
• Customer effort score (CES). This key performance indicator measures the effort required by a customer to resolve a product or service issue. Customer effort score is a common datapoint found in a company’s customer relationship management software because customer retention will drop if clients struggle to reach your team or resolve their issue. 
• Customer lifetime value (CLV).Customer lifetime value is the total amount of revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire customer lifetime. CLV highlights the importance of the customer lifecycle and customer loyalty. 
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT). This metric measures a customer’s enjoyment of a product, service, or interaction. Companies use customer satisfaction scores to analyze customer interactions with their support teams and improve customer retention.
• First contact resolution. First contact resolution (FCR) tracks whether or not customer issues are solved in the first interaction with customer support without follow-ups. This is a key indicator of helpful customer service and helps create loyal customers. 
• Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend a brand to others. A high score indicates strong customer loyalty and satisfaction, while a low score signals potential issues with the customer experience that may hinder growth.
• First response time (FRT). First response time (FRT) measures how quickly a business responds to an initial customer request. This metric directly impacts NPS and the overall customer experience.
• Self-service ratio. Self-service ratio compares how many customer inquiries are resolved through automated or self-help tools versus live support. A high self-service ratio indicates effective customer self-service tools and reduces the volume of customer inquiries to live agents.