Customer support glossary
Plain-English definitions and side-by-side comparisons of the terms, metrics, and concepts customer support teams run into — each on its own page, with examples and the trade-offs that actually matter.
Abandonment Rate
Abandonment rate is the percentage of customers who leave a support queue (a chat or call) before ever connecting with an agent. It's a direct symptom of waiting too long: when the queue is slow, customers give up, and every abandoned contact is an unhappy customer and a lost chance to help.
AI Agent (Customer Support)
An AI agent in customer support is software that resolves customer questions on its own: it understands natural language, answers from your knowledge base, cites its sources, and hands off to a human when it isn't confident. Where a scripted chatbot can only follow fixed flows, an AI agent resolves documented issues directly.
Auto-Reply
An auto-reply is a message sent automatically in response to an incoming customer request — most often an acknowledgement ("We've got your message") or an out-of-office notice. Used well, it sets expectations and reassures customers their request was received, even before a human or AI agent picks it up.
Average Handle Time (AHT)
Average Handle Time (AHT) is the average total time it takes to handle a single customer contact — including talk or chat time, any hold time, and the after-contact work like notes and follow-ups. It's a core efficiency metric, but it should never be optimized at the expense of resolution quality.
Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
Average Speed of Answer (ASA) is the average time a customer waits in the queue before their contact is answered by an agent. Most common in chat and phone support, it measures queue wait specifically (not how long the whole interaction takes), and it's a direct driver of abandonment and satisfaction.
Business Hours (Support)
In customer support, business hours are the times your team is available to respond to customers. Clearly communicating them sets expectations about response times, scopes your SLAs, and tells customers when to expect a reply — while AI agents and self-service extend help into the hours your team is offline.
Canned Response
A canned response is a pre-written reply that support agents reuse to answer common questions quickly and consistently. Also called saved replies or macros, they cut repetitive typing and keep answers accurate — but they should be personalized with the customer's details so they don't feel robotic.
CES
CES (Customer Effort Score) measures how hard a customer had to work to get an issue resolved or a task done. You ask them to rate a statement like "The company made it easy to handle my issue" on an agreement scale. Lower effort predicts loyalty and repeat business more reliably than high satisfaction alone.
Chatbot
A chatbot is software that answers customer questions automatically through a chat interface — using either fixed decision-tree flows or, increasingly, AI trained on your content. It responds instantly, handles unlimited conversations at once, and runs around the clock, making it a core tool for deflecting repetitive support questions.
Churn Rate
Churn rate is the percentage of customers (or revenue) you lose over a period. It's the inverse of retention and one of the most important health metrics for any subscription business — small differences in churn compound dramatically over time, so even a point or two matters.
Conversational Support
Conversational support is a messaging-first approach to helping customers — meeting them in real-time, chat-style conversations (live chat, in-app messaging, AI agents) rather than formal ticket exchanges. It feels personal and immediate, like texting a knowledgeable friend, while still being managed and measurable behind the scenes.
Cost per Contact
Cost per contact is the average fully-loaded cost of handling a single support interaction — total support spend divided by the number of contacts handled. It turns support's budget into a per-interaction number you can manage, and it's the metric automation most directly improves.
CSAT
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is a metric that measures how satisfied a customer was with a specific interaction, product, or service. You collect it by asking a short "How satisfied were you?" survey, then score it as the percentage of responses that are positive. It's the most direct, immediate read on support quality.
CSAT vs CES
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) measures how happy a customer was with an interaction. CES (Customer Effort Score) measures how hard they had to work to get their issue resolved. CSAT captures sentiment; CES captures friction — and low effort is often a stronger predictor of loyalty than high satisfaction.
CSAT vs NPS
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) measures how happy a customer was with a specific interaction, asked right after it happens. NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures long-term loyalty to your whole company, asked periodically. CSAT is transactional and tactical; NPS is relational and strategic. Most support teams track both.
Customer Experience (CX)
Customer experience (CX) is the total impression customers form from every interaction with your brand — marketing, product, support, billing, and everything between. It's broader than any single touchpoint: CX is how the whole journey feels, and it's increasingly the main thing companies compete on.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV, also written LTV) is the total revenue you can expect from a single customer over the entire relationship. It reframes customers as long-term assets rather than one-time sales — and it's the number that tells you how much you can afford to spend acquiring and supporting them.
Customer Retention Rate
Customer retention rate (CRR) is the percentage of existing customers you keep over a period, excluding any new ones you acquired. It's the inverse of churn and a direct measure of how well you hold onto the customers you already have — usually far cheaper than winning new ones.
Customer Service
Customer service is the practice of helping customers succeed across their entire journey — answering pre-sale questions, guiding onboarding, resolving issues, and nurturing the relationship over time. It's broader and often more proactive than customer support, which is the issue-resolution subset of it.
Customer Service vs Customer Support
Customer service is the broad practice of helping customers across their entire journey — onboarding, questions, guidance, and relationship-building. Customer support is the more technical subset focused on resolving specific problems and issues. Support is reactive and problem-led; service is broader and often proactive. In small teams, the same people do both.
Customer Support
Customer support is the function that helps customers resolve specific problems and questions about a product or service. It's the reactive, problem-solving side of helping customers (answering how-to questions, troubleshooting issues, and fixing what's broken), usually across channels like email, chat, and a help center.
Escalation (Customer Support)
Escalation is moving a support issue to someone better equipped to resolve it — a senior agent, a specialist team, or a manager. It happens when the first responder can't fully resolve a problem, whether for technical depth, authority, or because the customer requests it. Handled well, it resolves hard issues without frustrating the customer.
First Contact Resolution (FCR)
First Contact Resolution (FCR) is the percentage of customer issues fully resolved in a single interaction — no follow-ups, no callbacks, no reopened tickets. It's one of the strongest support metrics because high FCR correlates with both lower costs and higher satisfaction: customers get their answer once and move on.
First Response Time (FRT)
First Response Time (FRT) is the average time between a customer reaching out and getting the first human (or AI) reply. It's a first impression metric: a fast first response reassures customers their issue is being handled, even if the full resolution takes longer. It strongly influences satisfaction.
Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)
Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue you retain from existing customers, excluding any expansion. Because it only counts losses from churn and contraction, GRR can never exceed 100% — making it a pure, unflattering measure of how much revenue is leaking out.
Help Center
A help center is the customer-facing hub where people go to get help — combining a searchable knowledge base of articles with ways to contact support. It's the front door to self-service: customers search for an answer first, and reach a human only if they still need one.
Help Desk
A help desk is the team and software that answers customer questions and resolves issues — typically organizing incoming requests into a queue of tickets or conversations that agents work through. It's the operational hub of customer support, bringing every request into one place so nothing gets lost.
Help Desk vs Service Desk
A help desk resolves individual issues and answers questions — it's reactive, ticket-by-ticket, and often customer-facing. A service desk is broader: it manages IT services end to end (requests, incidents, changes) following ITIL, and is usually internal and IT-centric. Every service desk includes help-desk functions, but not every help desk is a service desk.
Knowledge Base
A knowledge base is an organized, searchable library of help articles (how-tos, FAQs, and troubleshooting) that lets customers find answers themselves. Built for findability, it deflects repetitive tickets, scales support without scaling headcount, and serves as the source of truth an AI agent answers from.
Knowledge Base vs Wiki
A knowledge base is a structured, curated library of help articles built for a specific audience — usually customers solving problems. A wiki is a loosely structured, collaboratively edited collection of pages, usually for internal knowledge. Knowledge bases optimize for findability and self-service; wikis optimize for open, flexible contribution.
Live Chat
Live chat is a channel that lets customers message a human support agent in real time through a widget on your website or app. It's fast and personal, ideal for questions that benefit from back-and-forth, and increasingly pairs with an AI agent that handles instant answers and hands off to a person when needed.
Live Chat vs Chatbot
Live chat connects a customer to a human agent in real time. A chatbot replies automatically using scripted flows or AI, with no human involved. Live chat is higher quality but limited by staffing and hours; a chatbot is instant and always on but limited to what it's trained for. The best support uses both behind one widget.
Macro (Customer Support)
In customer support, a macro is a reusable action that inserts a pre-written reply and can also perform steps like setting a status, adding tags, or assigning the ticket — all in one click. It's a canned response that does more than text, automating the routine handling around a common reply.
MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution)
MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) is the average time it takes to fully resolve a customer issue, from first report to confirmed fix. Unlike response time, it measures end-to-end resolution speed — making it a strong indicator of how effectively your team and tools close problems, not just acknowledge them.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue you retain from existing customers over a period, including expansion (upgrades) and net of contraction and churn. An NRR above 100% means your existing customers grow your revenue even before you add a single new one.
NPS
NPS (Net Promoter Score) measures customer loyalty by asking one question: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" on a 0-10 scale. Subtract the percentage of detractors (0-6) from the percentage of promoters (9-10) for a score from -100 to +100. It's a relationship-level signal, not an interaction-level one.
Omnichannel Support
Omnichannel support unifies every support channel (email, chat, social, phone) into one connected experience where context follows the customer across them. Unlike multichannel support, where channels operate in silos, omnichannel means an agent sees the full history no matter where the conversation started.
Proactive Support
Proactive support is reaching out to help customers before they ask — anticipating problems and addressing them rather than waiting for a ticket. Examples include status-page updates during an outage, in-app tips at a known sticking point, or messaging customers about an issue before they notice it. It prevents tickets instead of just resolving them.
Resolution Rate
Resolution rate is the percentage of support tickets that get resolved out of all tickets received in a period. It's a fundamental throughput metric — are you actually closing what comes in? A resolution rate consistently below 100% means a growing backlog of unresolved issues.
Saved Reply
A saved reply is a reusable, pre-written message that support agents insert to answer common questions in a couple of keystrokes. It's the same idea as a canned response (a library of vetted answers the whole team shares), built to make repetitive replies fast and consistent.
Self-Service Support
Self-service support lets customers resolve their own questions without contacting an agent — through a knowledge base, FAQs, in-product guidance, or an AI agent. Most customers prefer it: an instant correct answer beats waiting in a queue, and every self-served question is a ticket your team never has to handle.
Service Desk
A service desk is the single point of contact between an IT organization and its users, managing the full lifecycle of IT services (service requests, incidents, and changes) following ITIL practices. It's broader and more process-driven than a help desk, and is usually internal and IT-centric.
Shared Inbox
A shared inbox is a collaborative workspace where a team manages one email address (like support@) together. On top of plain email it adds assignment, status, internal notes, saved replies, and shared visibility — so everyone sees what's handled, what's waiting, and who owns each conversation.
Shared Inbox vs Distribution List
A distribution list (like support@) forwards each email to everyone on it — but no one can see who's replying, what's been handled, or who owns what. A shared inbox is a collaborative workspace on top of that address: assignments, statuses, internal notes, and shared visibility. Distribution lists broadcast; shared inboxes coordinate.
SLA (Service Level Agreement)
An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a documented commitment about service quality — most often, in support, a promise to respond or resolve within a set time. SLAs set clear expectations for customers and clear targets for your team, and you track how reliably you meet them with an SLA attainment rate.
Support Ticket
A support ticket is a single, tracked record of a customer request or issue — created when someone reaches out, carried through to resolution. Each ticket has its own status, history, and owner, which is what lets a team manage many requests without losing track of any of them.
Ticket Deflection
Ticket deflection is resolving a customer's question before it ever becomes an agent ticket — through a help center, an AI agent, or in-product answers. The deflection rate is the share of potential contacts handled this way. Higher deflection means lower cost, faster answers for customers, and agents freed for complex work.
Ticketing System
A ticketing system converts customer requests into structured, trackable tickets — each with a reference number, status, priority, and routing. It's built to manage support at scale: high volumes, multiple teams, and formal processes, with reporting on everything that flows through.
Ticketing System vs Shared Inbox
A ticketing system converts every request into a formal ticket with IDs, queues, statuses, and automation — powerful but more rigid and process-heavy. A shared inbox keeps support as natural email-style conversations the whole team can manage together. Ticketing scales structure; shared inboxes keep things personal and low-overhead.
Voice of the Customer (VoC)
Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the practice of systematically capturing what customers think, want, and need — through surveys, feedback, reviews, and support conversations — and feeding it into decisions. It turns scattered customer signals into a structured input for product, support, and strategy.
Free tools for support teams
AI Answer Generator
Paste a customer question and get three answers back — formal, friendly, and concise — plus ready-to-send answer starters.
Open toolAI Response Generator
Paste a customer message, pick a tone, and generate a support reply — plus ready-to-send templates.
Open toolAI Reply Generator
Paste any message — email, text, or chat — say what you want to convey, and generate a reply, plus ready-to-send templates.
Open toolAI Email Response Generator
Paste the email you need to answer, pick tone, length, and context, and generate a complete reply, plus ready-to-send email templates.
Open tool