Customer support glossary

Definitions for customer-support, contact-center, and AI terminology used across the platform and our documentation. Browse alphabetically; click any term for the full entry.

• Agent assist
  AI features that help a human agent during a live conversation without taking over.
• Asynchronous messaging
  A conversation pattern where messages can be sent and answered hours or days apart.
• Average handle time (AHT)
  The average duration of one conversation end to end, including talk, hold, and after-call work.
• Canned response
  A pre-written reply an agent can insert with one click.
• CCaaS
  Contact Center as a Service: cloud-delivered contact-center software.
• Co-browsing
  A support technique where an agent views and optionally controls a customer's browser tab.
• Contact center
  A multi-channel customer-service operation handling chat, email, and phone.
• Cosine similarity
  A vector-math metric for how aligned two embeddings are.
• CSAT
  Customer Satisfaction Score: a post-interaction survey of the support experience.
• E.164 phone format
  The ITU-T standard for international phone-number formatting.
• Escalation
  The structured handoff of a conversation to a higher tier of support.
• First response time (FRT)
  Elapsed time between the customer's first message and the agent's first reply.
• Intent classification
  AI that labels an incoming message with the customer's underlying goal.
• LLM fine-tuning
  Continuing the training of a pretrained language model on domain-specific data.
• LLM prompt engineering
  Designing the input to a language model to shape its output.
• Macro
  A saved bundle of agent actions: reply, tag, status change, transfer.
• Messenger app
  The customer-facing embedded chat surface on a website.
• NPS
  Net Promoter Score: a loyalty metric based on a single recommend-likelihood question.
• Omnichannel vs multichannel
  Channels merged at the data layer vs channels running in parallel silos.
• Proactive messaging
  Automatically opening a chat with a visitor based on behavior triggers.
• Queue abandonment
  The share of customers who leave the queue before reaching an agent.
• RAG
  Retrieval-Augmented Generation: pairing retrieval with a language model for grounded answers.
• Saved reply
  The message.com term for canned responses.
• Sentiment analysis
  AI that scores a message on a positive-to-negative axis.
• SLA
  Service Level Agreement: a written commitment to specific support targets.
• STIR/SHAKEN
  The United States caller-ID authentication standard for VOIP.
• Ticket deflection
  The share of customer questions resolved without ever creating a ticket.
• Triage
  Sorting incoming conversations by urgency and routing to the right team.
• UCCaaS
  Unified Communications and Contact Center as a Service: bundled UCaaS plus CCaaS.
• Vector embedding
  A numerical representation of text in a high-dimensional space for similarity search.
• Widget vs launcher
  The whole embedded chat surface vs the floating button that opens it.