Glossary of CX terms
Find explanations for some of the terms used in Customer Experience (CX).
| Abandonment rate | The rate at which a customer abandons an interaction before task completion. |
| Cross-channel | Refers to a mix of channel offered to customers across different stages of their journey. These channels usually interact in a cohesive way, e.g. a customer jumping from a Facebook Messenger chatbot to a phone call with a live agent. |
| Conversion rate | A metric that indicates the percentage of potential customers that take a desired action, e.g. signing up for life insurance after opening an email. |
| Customer centricity | The process of putting the customer at the centre of a process and its decisions, focused on understanding customers at a holistic level whilst advocating for them. |
| Customer effort | The amount of effort experienced by a customer whilst interacting with a specified process, task or service. |
| Customer Effort Score (CES) | A metric that measures customer effort, i.e. amount of time and energy required to complete a certain task or process. It is represented by a scoring range of 0-7. |
| Customer experience (CX) | The sum of a customer’s experiences, perceptions, feelings and responses resulting from their interactions with an organisation, process, product or service. |
| Customer experience management (CEM, CXM) | A mix of processes used to monitor and organise interactions between customers and an organisation across the whole customer journey and lifecycle. |
| Customer journey map (CJM) | A customer journey map is a visual story about the process by which a customer interacts with a business in order to achieve a goal. |
| Delighter | A feature of an experience that is not expected by a customer, and therefore do not cause dissatisfaction when not encountered. Delighters will lead to higher satisfaction when experienced, however. |
| Design Thinking | Refers to a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand customers, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. |
| Empathy Map | An empathy map is a tool used to gain deeper insight into customers. Much like a user persona, an empathy map can represent a group of users, such as a customer segment. It can help you deliver a better user experience for your product/service. |
| Human-Centred Design (HCD) | Human-Centred Design is a creative approach to problem solving, that puts people at the centre of decision making. |
| Moments of truth | The key moments of the experience that can form a customer's opinion (positive or negative) about its services or products. |
| Pain points | Areas of friction, frustration or difficulty customers face in their experience with a particular interaction, service or product. |
| Persona | Customer personas are fictional characters whose goals represent a larger group of people. They are research outputs, created by analysing stories and quantitative data about your customers, related to your product. |
| Root cause analysis | A method to uncover the root cause of a problem by identifying the underlying factors or causes of an event. |
| Sentiment analysis | The identification of key themes or categories expressed in customer feedback. |
| Touchpoint | Refers to a specific interaction between a customer and an organisation. It includes the channel and technologies used for the interaction, and the specific task being completed. |
| User experience (UX) | User experience includes all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the organisation, its services, and its products. |