Customer Support Glossary

Tickets and channels

Term	Meaning
Ticket	One customer request tracked in the ticketing system, with all messages and notes.
Queue	The list of tickets waiting for agents.
Channel	How the customer contacts: email, chat, phone, social, SMS, form.
Omnichannel	Handling all channels in one place, so one customer's messages are linked.
Triage	Reading, tagging and prioritizing a new ticket.
Priority	Urgent, High, Normal or Low, based on impact.
Status	New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Solved, Closed.
Pending	We are waiting for the customer.
On-hold	We are waiting for someone inside the business or a vendor.
Internal note	A note only the team sees. Never sent to the customer.
Public reply	A message the customer sees.
Tag	A label on a ticket, such as the contact reason.
Root cause	The real reason the customer had to contact us.
Merge	Combining two tickets from the same customer about the same issue.
Master ticket	One ticket that links all tickets about the same outage or bug.
Macro	A saved reply, sometimes with saved actions.
Knowledge base	The library of help articles.
Concurrency	How many chats an agent handles at once.
Warm transfer	Passing a caller to someone else after briefing them, so the customer does not repeat anything.
Cold transfer	Passing a caller with no briefing. Not allowed at Narqix.

Tiers and roles

Term	Meaning
Tier 1	Front line. Common questions, in-policy actions, triage.
Tier 2	Senior support. Complaints, exceptions, disputes, troubleshooting.
Escalation	Passing a ticket to someone with more authority or knowledge.
Refund and Exception Matrix	The client's written rules on who can approve what, up to which amount.
Authority limit	The highest refund or credit you may approve alone.
QA	Quality assurance: scoring samples of work against the scorecard.
Calibration	Reviewers scoring the same items and agreeing on the rules.
Auto-fail	A mistake serious enough to score the whole interaction zero.

Metrics

Term	Meaning
FRT	First response time. Time until a person first replies.
SLA	Service level agreement. The response or resolution times the client expects.
Service level	For phones: share of calls answered within a set time (80% in 20 seconds).
Abandon rate	Share of callers who hang up before an answer.
AHT	Average handle time per contact.
FCR	First contact resolution: solved on the first contact.
One-touch resolution	Solved with a single agent reply.
Reopen rate	Share of solved tickets the customer reopened.
CSAT	Customer satisfaction: good ratings divided by all ratings.
Backlog	Unsolved tickets. Backlog age measures how old they are.

Orders, payments and refunds

Term	Meaning
WISMO	"Where is my order?" The most common support question in online retail.
Tracking number	The carrier's reference for a parcel.
Carrier trace or claim	A request to the delivery company to find a parcel or pay for a lost one.
RMA	Return merchandise authorization: approval and reference for a return.
Return window	The number of days a customer has to return an item.
Store credit	Value added to the customer's account to spend later.
Goodwill gesture	A small credit or refund offered when service fell short.
Partial refund	Returning part of the price.
Original payment method	The card or account the customer paid with. Refunds go only here.
Chargeback	When a customer asks their bank to reverse a payment.
Pre-authorization	A temporary hold on a card that may look like a charge but drops off later.
Proration	Charging or refunding only for the part of a billing period used.

Accounts and security

Term	Meaning
Identity verification	The client's method of confirming the customer is the account owner.
Account takeover	Someone other than the owner gaining control of an account. Urgent.
2FA	Two-factor authentication: a second code or prompt when logging in.
Phishing	Fake messages that try to steal logins or money.
Redact	Hide or remove sensitive data (like a card number) from a ticket.

Methods at Narqix

Term	Meaning
Answer-First reply	Personal line, answer, details, next step, sign-off.
STEER Method	Settle, Tell it back, Empathize and own, Execute with a time, Record the root.
Tell it back	Restating the customer's problem in their words.
Personal line	The first line of a reply that proves you read the message.

Check yourself

1. What is the difference between FRT and FCR?
2. What does WISMO stand for?
3. Why do refunds go only to the original payment method?
4. What is a pre-authorization, and why do customers sometimes think it is a double charge?

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