CX Terminology: Your Quick Guide to Speak the Same Language as Your Customers

In the B2B world, CX isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a strategic lever. But all too often, terms like “NPS”, “customer churn”, “effort score” and the like are used loosely — leading to misalignment across teams. At SurveyGauge we believe clarity matters. That’s why we’ve pulled together a list of technical CX terms, what they mean, and how they should influence your actions.

1. NPS (Net Promoter Score)

Definition: A metric that asks customers (typically on a scale of 0-10) how likely they are to recommend your company/product to others.
Why it matters: NPS is often treated as a proxy for loyalty and growth. A high NPS = customers who are happy, engaged, and likely to advocate. A low NPS or a large number of detractors means risk.
In practice:

• Segment your respondents into Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), Detractors (0-6).
• Use NPS not only as a snapshot but as a trend — are you improving over time?
• Don’t stop at the number: solicit the why behind the score. That enables action.

2. CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)

Definition: A metric that asks customers to rate how satisfied they are with a specific interaction, product or overall relationship (often on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale).
Why it matters: CSAT is more immediate, specific, and transactional than NPS. While NPS looks at broader loyalty, CSAT is about “how happy are you right now”.
In practice:

• Use CSAT after key touchpoints: on-boarding, renewal, support calls, product delivery.
• Track trends over time and by segment. Where CSAT drops, dig into root-causes.
• Combine CSAT with qualitative feedback: numbers tell you what, words tell you why.

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

Definition: A metric that asks how much effort a customer needed to expend to get their issue resolved, purchase completed, or task done.
Why it matters: Research shows that high effort — even among satisfied customers — is a predictor of churn. Customers don’t always leave because they hate you; they leave because you made things harder than they should be.
In practice:

• Use CES at moments of friction: support closure, onboarding, renewals.
• Set goal targets: aim to minimise effort, ideally shifting “very high effort” responses to “low effort”.
• Use the responses to identify process bottlenecks — if certain segments consistently report high effort, that’s a red flag.

4. Churn Rate / Customer Attrition

Definition: The percentage of customers who stop doing business with you during a given period.
Why it matters: In B2B, churn can be very costly — losing one major account can outweigh many smaller wins. It’s a tangible reflection of CX and loyalty.
In practice:

• Monitor churn alongside NPS, CSAT, CES. High churn with “good” scores is a mismatch you must resolve.
• Conduct exit / off-boarding surveys to learn why customers left.
• Segment churn by reason (price, product, service, competitor) and take targeted preventive action.

5. Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Definition: The aggregate term for how you collect, interpret and act on customer feedback — from surveys, interviews, support logs, social media, etc.
Why it matters: Having a VoC program means you’re not just collecting data — you’re listening and doing something with it. In a mature CX programme, VoC feeds insights into product development, service improvement, and strategic planning.
In practice:

• Map the customer journey and decide key moments for feedback.
• Use mixed methods: quantitative (NPS/CSAT/CES) + qualitative (open comments + interviews).
• Ensure you ‘close the loop’: respond to feedback, make changes, communicate back to customers so they know they were heard.

6. Sentiment Analysis & Text Analytics

Definition: Using (often AI-powered) tools to analyse open-ended feedback (comments) and identify themes, tone (positive, negative, neutral), frequency of keywords etc.
Why it matters: As feedback volumes scale, manually reading everything becomes infeasible. Sentiment analysis helps surface patterns (e.g., recurring complaints) that might otherwise be hidden.
In practice:

• Regularly review sentiment dashboards and drill into any shifts (e.g., sentiment drops this quarter).
• Use these insights to prioritise which CX pain-points to address first.
• Combine with other metrics (e.g., if high-effort responses correlate with negative sentiment clusters, you’ve found a hotspot).

7. Customer Journey Mapping

Definition: A visual representation of all the touchpoints a customer experiences, from initial awareness to renewal or expansion — including backstage processes and systems.
Why it matters: Without seeing the journey end-to-end, you risk optimising individual moments (e.g., support calls) and missing system-wide friction (e.g., hand-offs between teams).
In practice:

• Involve cross-functional stakeholders (sales, service, product, ops) when mapping the journey.
• Overlay customer feedback (NPS/CSAT/CES) onto the map to highlight moments of friction and delight.
• Use the map to prioritise improvement projects: where’s the biggest pain/impact gap?

8. Closed-Loop Feedback

Definition: The process of following up on customer feedback (especially negative feedback), taking corrective action, and communicating those actions back to the customer/respondent.
Why it matters: Feedback without action hurts credibility. Customers will disengage (and stop responding) if they feel nothing happens with their input.
In practice:

• Define roles & responsibilities: who follows up with detractors or high-effort experiences?
• Use automation or workflows: trigger alerts on low scores, schedule calls, track resolution.
• Close the loop visibly: inform the customer what you’ve done as a result of their feedback — builds trust and future engagement.

9. Segmentation & Benchmarking

Definition: Dividing your customer base into meaningful groups (by size, industry, geography, tenure, behaviour) and comparing internal scores or against peer-benchmark data.
Why it matters: A single overall NPS or CSAT number can mask underlying diversity. One segment may be thriving while another is faltering. Benchmarks help you understand where you stand.
In practice:

• Develop dashboards that show scores by segment and track trends.
• Use external benchmarks (industry or peer data) if available to gauge performance.
• Align internal teams around segment insights: e.g., “Our large enterprise customers have NPS of 45 vs. SMB NPS of 65 — what must we do differently for enterprise?”

10. Metric Cascade & Alignment

Definition: The structured connection from high-level business outcomes (e.g., revenue growth, churn reduction) to CX metrics (NPS/CSAT/CES) and down to operational metrics (e.g., first-contact resolution, onboarding time).
Why it matters: Without alignment, CX programmes can become disconnected from business value. Metric cascades ensure CX isn’t just “nice to have” but anchored to what matters.
In practice:

• Sit with leadership and define how CX metrics tie into business KPIs.
• For each CX metric, define what operational metric drives it (e.g., onboarding time → CSAT, hand-off time → CES).
• Monitor the cascade: if onboarding time rises and CSAT falls, you know where to focus.

Why it matters for B2B organisations

In B2B, the stakes are big. Losing one key account can have ripple effects on revenue, reputation and referrals. A mature CX programme lets you:

• Proactively identify at-risk customers (via NPS/CSAT + churn tracking)
• Understand deeper behaviours and drivers (via sentiment analysis + journey mapping)
• Drive cross-functional collaboration (since CX touches sales, service, product, operations)
• Turn feedback into measurable business impact (lower churn, higher renewal, stronger advocacy)

At SurveyGauge we work with companies who turn their feedback programmes into growth engines — collecting data is only the start; using it for meaningful action is where the real value lies. (And yes, metrics matter — but so does listening, understanding and responding.)

We hope this guide helps you – and your broader organisation – speak the same CX language, act with clarity, and turn feedback into growth.