KnowledgeGlossary

The terms, explained.

70 terms in context: not just definitions, but what they mean in practice.

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.

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