Glossary
70 Terms with practical context - not just definitions, but what they actually mean in the real world.
Advocacy
Customers who recommend you without being asked. Your cheapest and most credible growth engine.
Agentic AI
AI that acts autonomously in customer experience. Not a chatbot, but an independent decision-maker.
Average Handle Time
The average length of a support interaction. An efficiency metric that can quietly destroy quality.
Benchmark
A reference point that makes your CX numbers meaningful. Without a benchmark, an NPS score is just a number.
Churn
Customer attrition. The most expensive metric in your business because each lost customer costs 5-7x more to replace.
Close the Loop
Contacting dissatisfied customers to resolve their problem. The CX activity that delivers the fastest ROI.
Contact Rate
The percentage of customers who need to reach support. A high rate is a symptom, not the disease.
Cost per Contact
What every support interaction actually costs you. The efficiency benchmark behind every CX ROI case.
Cross-sell
Offering additional, complementary products to existing customers. The cheapest growth you can buy.
CSAT
Customer Satisfaction Score. The most intuitive satisfaction metric: 'How satisfied were you?' on a 1-5 scale.
Customer Centricity
Placing customer needs at the centre of every decision. Not a department, but a culture.
Customer Effort Score
Measures how hard it was for the customer to resolve their issue. Low effort beats high satisfaction as a loyalty driver.
Customer Experience
The sum of every interaction a customer has with your brand. Your product is how it feels to use you.
Customer Experience Excellence (CEE)
KPMG's global CX benchmark based on 80,000+ interviews. The most comprehensive ranking of customer experiences.
Customer Experience Management
The strategic discipline of measuring and improving every customer interaction. CX operationalised.
Customer Feedback
Everything customers tell you, directly and indirectly, about their experience. The raw material of CX.
Customer Health Score
An early warning system for churn. Combines product usage, NPS, and support data into one score.
Customer Journey
The customer's complete experience from first contact to advocacy. Your most important tool for finding friction.
Customer Lifetime Value
The total value a customer generates across the entire relationship. The metric that links customer experience to the bottom line.
Customer Loyalty
The likelihood a customer keeps choosing you over the alternatives. Earned slowly, lost quickly.
Customer Relationship Management
The system and discipline of managing customer relationships end to end. The operational backbone of CX.
Customer Segmentation
Grouping customers by shared characteristics so you can serve each group on its own terms.
Customer Sentiment Score
The quantified emotional tone of customer feedback across every channel. Sentiment captured at scale.
Customer Success
A proactive discipline that helps customers achieve their desired outcomes with your product. Retention as a strategy, not a reaction.
Customer Value Proposition
The clear statement of why a customer should choose you. The anchor for product, marketing and service.
Detractor
NPS score 0-6. Dissatisfied customers who can actively damage your reputation and have 4x higher churn risk.
Empathic Service
Customer service that acknowledges how the customer feels, not just what they need. The reason a 30-second longer call sometimes saves the relationship.
Employee Net Promoter Score
NPS for employees. A leading indicator for future customer NPS: unhappy staff do not deliver great customer experiences.
Feature Adoption Rate
The percentage of users actively using a specific feature. Proof of value realisation.
First Contact Resolution
The proportion of enquiries resolved at first contact. The strongest driver of high CSAT in customer service.
First Response Time
How long a customer waits for your first reply. The single metric that shapes support perception most.
Gross Revenue Retention
Revenue retained excluding upsell. A pure measure of how much churn is actually costing you.
Journey Completion / Satisfaction
The percentage of journeys completed, combined with satisfaction at the end. Customer journey mapping made measurable.
Key Performance Indicator
A metric chosen to evaluate progress against a specific goal. Not every number you can measure deserves to be a KPI.
LTV to CAC Ratio
Customer lifetime value divided by acquisition cost. The economic reality check for every growth model.
Monthly Recurring Revenue
Predictable monthly subscription income. The heartbeat metric of every SaaS business.
Multichannel Support
Offering support across many channels. Not to be confused with omnichannel, where the channels actually talk to each other.
Net Promoter Score
The most widely used customer loyalty metric in the world. One question, 0-10 scale, strongly correlated with growth.
Net Revenue Retention
Revenue retained from existing customers including upsell and churn. SaaS growth health in one number.
Omnichannel Analytics
Analytics that stitches every interaction into one customer story. Because the customer does not live in one channel at a time.
Omnichannel Communication
Channels that share context so the customer never has to repeat themselves. The experience multichannel pretends to deliver.
Omnichannel Customer Support
Customer service where every channel shares the same context. The customer starts anywhere and never has to start over.
Onboarding
The first 90 days that determine whether the customer stays or churns. Your most important retention investment.
Passive
NPS score 7-8. Satisfied but vulnerable customers who will switch to a competitor at the first better offer.
Personalisation
Tailoring interactions to the individual customer. Not "Hi [First Name]" - the right offer at the right moment.
Predictive Analytics
Using historical data and statistical models to anticipate what customers will do next.
Proactive Customer Service
Solving the customer's problem before they report it. The quietest way to raise CSAT.
Promoter
NPS score 9-10. Your most valuable customers with 2-3x higher CLV and active recommendation.
Quality Assurance
The systematic review of customer interactions to keep standards high and consistent.
Real-time Analytics
Insight available the moment it matters. The difference between reacting today and explaining yesterday.
Relationship Survey
A periodic pulse on the entire customer relationship. Catches the silent dissatisfaction that transactional surveys miss.
Reopen Rate
The share of resolved tickets customers reopen. The quietest signal that your resolution was not really a resolution.
Repeat Purchase Rate
The share of customers who come back and buy again. Retention in transactional businesses.
Resolution Time
The time from a ticket being created to being fully resolved. What the customer actually cares about.
Response Rate
The proportion who complete your survey. Below 15% is a warning signal that customers do not believe you act on feedback.
Retention
The ability to keep existing customers. A 5 percentage point improvement can increase profit by 25-95%.
Return on Investment
The financial return produced by an investment, relative to its cost. The language CX needs to speak in the boardroom.
Root Cause Analysis
Finding the real cause of customer problems, not the symptom. Ask 'why' five times.
Self-Service
Tools that let customers solve their own problems. When done well, the fastest, cheapest and most-preferred support channel.
Self-Service Rate
The share of issues customers resolve without talking to an agent. CX scalability in one number.
Sentiment Analysis
AI-powered analysis of customer emotions in free text. Makes thousands of open responses actionable in minutes.
Service Level Agreement
Contractual commitments on response and resolution times. The service promise made explicit.
Six Pillars of Customer Experience
Six universal drivers of customer experience. Personalisation drives loyalty most. Integrity drives NPS most.
Stickiness Ratio (DAU/MAU)
Daily active users divided by monthly active users. How deeply your product is woven into daily life.
Time to Value
The time from signup to the first moment of real value. The single most important onboarding metric.
Total Experience (TX)
A strategic approach that integrates customer, employee, partner, and digital experiences into one coherent, adaptive whole
Touchpoint
Any point of contact between customer and company. There are no neutral touchpoints.
Transactional Survey
A survey sent immediately after an interaction. Gives concrete, actionable feedback while the experience is fresh.
Voice of Customer
Your system for collecting, analysing, and acting on customer feedback. Without action, it is just data.
Workforce Management
The discipline of having the right agents in the right place at the right time. Where service levels are actually won.