Glossary
Customer Service Representative Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential customer service representative terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key customer service representative vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in customer service representative training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Average handle time (AHT)
- The average length of an interaction, including wrap-up.
- Churn
- Customers who stop doing business with a company.
- CSAT
- Customer satisfaction score from surveys.
- De-escalation
- Calming an upset customer to resolve the issue.
- Empathy statement
- A phrase acknowledging the customer’s feelings.
- Escalation
- Transferring an issue to a higher level of support or a supervisor.
- First contact resolution (FCR)
- Solving the issue on the first interaction.
- Hold etiquette
- Asking permission before placing customers on hold and checking back regularly.
- Knowledge base
- A library of articles with answers and procedures.
- NPS
- Net Promoter Score: how likely customers are to recommend the company.
- Omnichannel
- Supporting customers across phone, chat, email and social media.
- SLA
- Service level agreement: target response or resolution times.
- Ticket
- A record of a customer issue in a support system.
- Upsell
- Offering a higher-value product or add-on.
- Wrap-up time
- After-call work such as notes and follow-ups.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Customer Service Representative practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Customer Service Representative training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.