Customer service has become a significant part of many business operations today, and it’s easy to see why. 93% of customers rate excellent customer service as one of the important factors that help them decide if a business is worth patronizing a second time. Poor customer service communication, ignoring customer complaints, and other distasteful customer service performances can significantly reduce your customer retention rates — a bad look for your business, as well as your profit charts. So, if you’re hoping to win the hearts of your customers on social media, provide exceptional support, and increase your business revenue, mastering the art of social customer service is the way to go. To help you make this happen, we’ve put together a list of the most popular social media customer service glossary of terms you should know and what they mean.
Consider this glossary your social media customer service team’s handy guide to getting acquainted with customer service lingo, concepts, and practices quickly and on the go. Feel free to bookmark this page for easy access to the terms when necessary. And also, you can contact us via elif@juphy.com if you have new term suggestions.
Now that we’ve settled that, let’s dive right in!
Social Media Customer Service Glossary of Terms Your Customer Service Team Should Know
Your team needs to understand social media customer service terms to provide clarity in the making customer and business-related decisions and to help the team collaborate better, eliminating miscommunication and confusion.
It also gives a clear idea of how certain processes work if there’s a need to explain that to customers. Check out our list:
A
Agent Lifecycle
This is the entire number of interactions a customer support agent has with a brand, from the time they join the team until they resign or their appointment is terminated. It begins with the process of sourcing for agents, then onboarding, and finally, termination of the association.
Agents
An agent in customer service is a brand representative that provides support for customers and handles any interactions with them. They help customers figure out what issues they’re facing and find possible solutions to these issues from their contact centers.
Algorithm
An algorithm is a set of rules or processes that determines how information is evaluated. Algorithms are how social media platforms decide what content to display to a specific customer at any time. Customers’ social relationships and interactions are often used to determine which content will appeal to them most on social networks.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
This is any form of assistive technology that enables customer service representatives to provide better service for customers. AI in customer service may include customer support chatbots, machine learning for customer data analysis, customer self-service tools, etc. The use of AI in customer service helps eliminate repetitive tasks, reduce operational costs, and increase revenue.
Audience Response
This is commonly used in social media to describe how customers interact with your brand and product. Audience response is how customers engage with your business’s activities through social media. The responses can be positive or negative, but what matters is that your brand listens to what customers have to say about your products and services.
Avatar
This is the profile picture that customers can choose from on a social platform or digital product. The most common avatar for social media is a photograph, sometimes enhanced with digital frames or filters. An avatar is usually used for promotional purposes and is visible to others on the platform. Logos are typically the best avatars for brands.
B
Backlog
This refers to any number of accumulated unresolved tickets that customer service agents have been unable to attend to due to a high influx of customer complaints, unavailable hands, or poor organizational structure. Customer service teams must try to avoid backlogs because it leads to an increase in the customer waiting time — leading to poor customer satisfaction.
Benchmarking
This is the process of evaluating an agent or customer support team’s performance against previous performance or a competitor’s performance. It’s an ideal strategy for helping your customer support team improve their support potential, identifying poorly-performing agents who need to be taken off the team or provided with more training.
Big Data
This refers to the entire collation of all the interactions your team has had with customers and the process of analyzing it for the company’s benefit. Big data refers only to a large or significant amount of data, as many companies now relate and interact with a huge amount of customer requests daily.
Bio
“Bio” is short for biography and refers to visible information about social media users on any given platform. It appears when you click on their profile picture or open the profile page. Customers choose whether to follow a brand’s updates or interact with a company based on the information they find in the bio.
Boost
Boost is an increase in reach offered by social media platforms that involve promoting your posts and content through paid ads to increase the reach to your followers, a recommended audience, or a targeted audience. On most Social media platforms, it shows up as a sponsored post on the targeted audience’s feed.
Bug
This term is significant for customer support teams interacting with digital brand products like software, applications, websites, etc. A bug is a fault or an error in a product that causes it to malfunction, leaving many users with issues when using it. Usually, the engineering team fixes bugs, but customer support reps help appease customers during this time.
Business Hours
These are the days and times during the week when a business is open for business or available to address customer complaints and requests. Business hours vary from company to company and may be modified based on demand or available customer service reps.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
BPO is where a company outsources or assigns certain tasks and responsibilities to external teams or organizations due to a lack of capable team members to work on such tasks or due to an overload of requests for support. It is mainly used by small or upcoming businesses with small-sized teams.
C
Call Center
This is a contact center that mainly deals with handling customer requests in the form of phone calls. They often handle a high amount of calls and are one of the busiest types of customer support teams. A call center differs from a general contact center by strictly attending to phone calls. Contact centers, on the other hand, may offer various other support channels.
Call-To-Action (CTA)
A call to action is a clear, straightforward message that encourages a consumer to take action. This might be clicking a link, downloading an app, or submitting a form. In social media, a good CTA should be short, memorable, and enticing enough that the audience wants to click on it. “Buy Now” is a common CTA example many brands use.
Canned Response
A canned response is a pre-recorded response that many customer services use to reduce customer response times. They usually answer the most frequently asked customer questions and are available to every support team member. However, canned responses may lead to a poor customer experience when used incorrectly. A customer service support tool like Juphy allows teams to create canned responses on the software to respond quickly to customers.
Chatbot
Customer support teams use this time-saving automated feature to improve their support. Through AI technology, it simulates human conversations by responding to customer requests or inquiries using pre-configured replies.
Content Creator
A content creator writes and shares engaging content designed to educate or entertain an audience. An article or blog post about a brand, product, or service is called content, and a creator posts online via social media channels. A content creator creates and manages social media posts and responds to comments and questions from social media users.
Crisis Management
This is an essential aspect of customer service that helps support teams foresee or identify potential threats and business emergencies. Crisis management requires adequate planning and preparation to eliminate or side-step crisis escalation with customers.
Cross-sell
This is a sales tactic that sales and support reps use to increase sales and boost business revenue. To achieve this, reps try to sell products to their existing customers based on their previous purchase history.
Customer Churn
Customer churn refers to a time in the customer journey when they stop doing business with you and switch to a competitor business. Poor customer service is one of the leading causes of churn. To calculate your customer churn rate, measure the percentage of how many customers you lose over a specific period, say 1 year or 6 months.
Customer Engagement
This metric measures how customers interact with your brand’s social media accounts. Customer engagement is key to building a loyal following on social media. Social media customer engagements can be monitored through likes, comments, retweets, mentions, reposts, shares, etc. Active social media interactions from your brand can help boost customer engagement.
Customer Experience (CX)
This means different things to different people, but you can consider digital customer experience as the total experience a customer has from the moment of finding out about the business to deciding to make a purchase and interacting with the business. It entails how a customer perceives or feels about a business. It also comprises the beliefs they form in their mind about the business and the expectations they have about it.
Customer Loyalty
The feeling of commitment a customer has towards a brand that is formed over time is known as customer loyalty. This is what makes customers continue to do business with a brand, even if a competitor offers the same service at loyal rates. Customer loyalty also is evident when a customer refers your brand to friends and family because they trust your service.
Customer Persona
This is a profile created by a company describing the ideal type of customer for the business. The customer persona holds a detailed fictional description of the target customer that a business should focus its marketing tactics toward in reality. A customer persona is profiled based on market research, customer data analysis, and surveys.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A tool to build and improve relationships and interactions with customers throughout their customer journey. CRM combines specific strategies and tools to help achieve this. The end result of properly-done CRM is an improvement in customer satisfaction, increased customer retention rates, and a boost in revenue.
Customer Request
Any question or query from a customer regarding the business. It may include queries about sales, deliveries, product features, etc.
Customer Retention
Refers to the ability of a company to convert one-time customers into repeat buyers. It entails the process and activities carried out to ensure your customers frequently purchase your products and services over time without switching over to a competitor. High customer retention rates are an indication that customers are satisfied with the quality of your service.
Customer Review
Customer reviews are feedback about a customer and the service they provide. Social media reviews are assessments of goods and services based on customer feedback posted on social media sites. Customer reviews can be in the form of a rating system, tags, comments, and suggestions. Customer reviews on social media are an excellent way for you to find out what your customers say about your brand.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
This is a metric used to determine how satisfied a customer is with your service It is an average of the score that customers give to your brand after an interaction with your customer service personnel. Tracking metrics like these helps customer support teams figure out how to grow and improve their services.
Customer Service
Customer service is briefly defined as the assistance that support teams render to a customer in response to a query, complaint, or inquiry about the company’s products or services. Customer service is usually carried out by a company’s customer service representative via customer service channels or customer support tools.
Customer-Centric
This is when a company focuses its business operations, strategies, and marketing tactics on its customers. The customer is placed at the center of all business decisions and operations, and the company focuses on providing its customers with premium services first, before anything else.
D
Dark Post
A dark post is an unpublished social media update offered as an advertisement to a particular targeted audience. It’s a post that does not appear on a brand’s timeline and is not naturally discoverable. Dark posts can assist with split testing and keep your timeline from being overrun with advertisements. Only targeted customers see a dark post when it pops up on their feed.
Direct Message
A direct message (DM) is a message sent privately through social platforms. Usually, if non-followers send DMs, they are blocked or filtered into a secondary inbox. It is best for brands to change inbox settings to receive DMs from anyone if they wish to interact with customers via DMs.
Disappearing Content
Disappearing content is a social post that disappears after a specific period, usually 24 hours (although there are a variety of periods). The content on Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, and Snaps disappears after a certain time. Disappearing content can help you increase engagement by creating a sense of scarcity.
E
Escalation Management
Sometimes, one customer service personnel may not be fit to resolve a customer’s ticket or complaint. Escalation management involves passing on that difficult or technical query to the most suitable support team member who can handle it best. This team member then resolves and de-escalates the situation.
F
Feature (for products)
A product feature is a specific function in a digital or physical product that provides a benefit(s) for the user when using that function.
Feedback
This refers to the thoughts and opinions that your customers, as well as other observers, have about your business in relation to areas that can be improved. It could also be either unsolicited or carefully sought out by the company. Solicited feedback includes reviews, while unsolicited feedback may be social media comments.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
This refers to a set of common questions customers often ask about the business. It is strategically collated to help new customers find their way around the company’s products and services or help existing customers find answers to questions about the business they’re not clear on.
Followers
Followers are social media users that opt to receive updates about another user’s profile or page. The purpose of posting content is often to gain followers. Customers follow brands on social media to keep abreast of their posts, images, videos, and articles. A follow always indicates an interest in receiving constant updates from your and a higher or more personal engagement level.
H
Help Desk
A help desk is a tool/software that enables support teams effectively manage and reply to customer emails in an organized way. They simplify the process of prioritizing or assigning customer queries, making the customer support process smooth and hitch-free.
Hidden Comment
When you hide a comment, it will not be visible to anyone else except the person who wrote it. By deleting the comment, it will be entirely erased, and no one will be able to find it. The hide comment option allows you to control what your followers can see in the comments added to your social media page. It’s a good way to maintain your online reputation and avoid conflict escalation.
I
Impressions
Impressions are estimates of how often an ad or promoted post is displayed on a social network after being uploaded. The same ad can appear in a social media user’s newsfeed multiple times during a given period. Impressions show a post’s view count, i.e. the number of people who have seen it, even if they haven’t clicked or commented.
Insights
These are analytics and performance metrics social media apps provide to content creators and professional accounts. Insights may provide information on your followers’ demographics, the best times to reach them online, the reach of each post, and more based on the sort of profile you have.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
This is an AI-enabled automated voice response system that allows customers to choose the assistance they require. One common example is the touch-tone keypad selection or speech recognition that you use to select a service when an automated voice gives you options over the phone. It’s a very essential feature for customer service teams dealing with huge call volumes.
K
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A metric that helps customer service teams track performance in relation to a specific goal they’re working towards. It helps teams keep their eye on the prize towards progress and improvement for their customers’ benefit.
Knowledge Base
A repository that contains various types of content such as articles, how-to videos, FAQs, picture guides, news, product information, and more enables customers and customer support teams to quickly find answers to questions or problems. A knowledge base is easily accessible online via a self-service portal or a brand’s website.
L
Live Chat
This instant messaging tool allows customer support teams to interact with many customers at once, and in real-time through the company website. It is convenient and fast for customers, cost-effective for businesses, and easy for teams to work with.
M
Mentions
A social mention is whenever someone mentions a person or brand online. This is an opportunity to engage with your audience and shape public perceptions. Mentions allow you to add other people’s social media profiles as you mention them in your own posts. This can be done on Facebook and Twitter, but it’s also possible on Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media platforms where mentions work.
Metric
Metrics are units used to measure different performances of your customer service team. Different metrics can give you an inkling into the state of your customers’ satisfaction when properly analyzed. A few customer service metrics include first contact resolution rate, average response time, and average handle time.
O
Omni-Channel
Omni-channel customer service is using numerous channels to interact with customers and provide service and support. The essence of this strategy is to create a hitch-free experience for customers where there’s no dearth to the availability of channels to interact with a company. Omni-channel customer support includes the use of chat, email, calls, social media, and more to provide support for customers.
Onboarding
This is the process of making customers or customer service teams familiar with a company’s tools or products. It requires schooling the software user on how to use the product and build a relationship with the business.
P
Personalization
Not too different from marketing personalization, personalization in customer service requires customer reps to help provide specific support for customers based on their specific needs, such that they feel heard and understood. An individualized, tailored experience for customers helps boost loyalty significantly.
Proactive Customer Service
The steps business take to anticipate and solve customer problems before they arise is known as proactive customer service. It is a custom where businesses make the first move to help customers out before they feel they need your help. It creates a memorable experience for customers and improves retention rates.
Product
This is any item or service you want to sell or provide for your customers. Products can be physical, such as books, clothes, furniture, food, etc. They can also be virtual, such as e-books, apps, software, etc.
Product Downtime
Product downtime in customer service is a period where a product cannot be used due to certain problems that have caused it to malfunction or undergo maintenance. Service downtime, on the other hand, is a period of time when a service is unavailable to customers.
Q
Quality Assurance
This is the processes and measures businesses put in place to ensure a product or service remains quality, from the beginning during the production stage, to the sales stage and any other time afterward. In customer service, quality assurance is the practice of monitoring the quality of conversations members of your team have with customers to help measure performance and improve support.
R
Reach
Reach is a term that refers to how many people see your content. The further your reach, the more exposure you have to potential customers. It’s measured by the number of people who click on your content and view it until they leave the site. Reach is important for your brand because it shows how many people are interested in your services.
Reactive Customer Service
This is the opposite of proactive customer service. Here, businesses take a passive approach to handling customer issues. It’s the typical, traditional method of customer support and requires agents to consistently be on the ground to attend to incoming queries when they arise.
Real-Time Marketing
Real-time marketing means providing real-time customer interaction, i.e., in-the-moment replies, as soon as the customer attempts to connect with your brand. This is as opposed to having the customer wait a while before getting a response. Juphy’s real-time notifications are especially useful for social media customer service teams in this regard.
Resolution Rate
This refers to how many tickets were resolved and the total number of tickets a customer support team received. High-resolution rates show a capable and qualified team that can attend to customers’ queries quickly and effectively.
Response Time
This indicates the average time it takes customer service teams to reply to customers’ queries or requests.
S
Self-Service
It is a method provided by companies that allow customers to access information related to their queries by themselves and attempt to solve the issue without enlisting the help of a support team. Self-service portals usually contain knowledge bases, an FAQ section, or an online user discussion forum.
Shadowban
A shadowban is when an account is banned from participating in certain actions they were previously able to do without receiving an official notice. If you find that some of your posts, comments, or activities are hidden or obscured from followers, you may have been shadowbanned. If followers cannot see your account’s content in their feeds, you may lose visibility in searches and have less engagement.
Social Feed
A social feed is a fresh batch of content uploaded by the accounts you follow on social media and updated on your timeline. When you follow certain accounts, you will receive an updated list of all the fresh content they have uploaded. The majority of social media feeds are algorithm-driven.
Social Inbox
Social inbox is a versatile and highly useful tool that allows your support team to log in to all your social media accounts from one unified dashboard. From this dashboard, you can access all social platforms and any query, concern, complaint, review, or feedback your customers provide. Juphy, for instance, is a social inbox that provides these services for social media customer support teams.
Social Media Automation
This involves using software tools to automate social media tasks that don’t require human interaction. Some forms of social media automation are scheduling posts beforehand, assembling material for re-publication, addressing common client inquiries, and creating analytics reports. Juphy has an automation feature that’s great for customer support teams.
Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement refers to using social media platforms to interact with customers and clients. Engagement can be done in various ways, such as sharing content on your social media accounts, responding to questions or comments posted by your customers, and engaging with other users on the same channels.
Social Media Management
Social media management is the process of monitoring, organizing, and responding to all online conversations related to your brand or business on social platforms. This includes monitoring customer complaints about products or services and tracking metrics such as page views and likes on posts. It also includes reaching out to customers who have left negative reviews to resolve their issues or address any concerns they may have about your company’s products or services.
Social Monitoring
Also known as social media monitoring, it is a practice where customer service reps use social media monitoring tools to track customer interactions on the social media platforms your brand engages on and respond to any comments, DMs, or discussions around the brand. Social monitoring looks out for any interaction with the brand, whether directly or indirectly, through keyword tracking tools like Juphy.
Sponsored Post
This is a paid advertising campaign where a social media platform, celebrity, or influencer promotes your product or brand. Sponsored posts can often be identified with hashtags like #ad or #sponsored to mark them as advertisements. It’s an efficient way to get more engagement on your social media pages and even bring potential clients to your company.
Support Ticket
A support ticket, also known as “conversations” is a record of an interaction between your customer and a support agent. Tickets are called “open” when they come in and “closed” when they have been resolved.
T
Ticket Resolution Time
Ticket resolution time is the total amount of time it takes for an agent to pick up and resolve a customer’s ticket to the customer’s satisfaction. There are many factors that may affect ticket resolution time, such as the complexity of the customer’s issue or the length of time it takes the customer to respond to the agent. For support teams looking to track their customer resolution and other response times, Juphy has a reports feature that gives you detailed information about these metrics.
Ticket Volume
This refers to the total number of tickets your customer support team receives daily. Tracking your ticket volume helps you determine whether you have sufficient resources and staff to meet customer demands and see if more needs to be implemented to achieve better customer satisfaction.
Final Thoughts
Now that you have this huge list of essential customer service terms at your fingertips, your team can breeze through tickets having a better idea of support processes. Working with a customer service support tool can also ease up the challenges of providing quality customer support for your customers. Juphy’s integrations and features make it the #1 social media customer service tool, as it contains all the necessary functions to take your customer service game a notch higher. Use this 1-click sign-up to access a 7-day free trial to get you started.