The CX and support glossary

A

Account

The business or organization behind a contact — separate from the individual person, so a B2B customer keeps its own record even as the people at that company change. See accounts and contacts.

AI agent

A configured, autonomous actor that replies to customers directly on the channels you publish it to — built on a visual flow, versioned, simulated before it goes live, and always with a handoff step to a human. Different from Copilot, which assists a human rather than replacing them. See AI agents.

Automation

A rule-based flow that reacts to an event — a new ticket, a keyword, a status change — with an action, without a human triggering it.

B

BYOC (bring your own channel)

A custom, non-standard channel you connect yourself, so a conversation source Samvaads does not natively support can still land in the shared inbox.

C

Campaign

A scheduled or triggered outbound send — WhatsApp, SMS, or email — to a defined audience, tracked for delivery and engagement. See campaigns.

Channel

A distinct way a customer reaches you: WhatsApp, email, the website widget, Instagram, voice, and so on. Omnichannel support means all of them feed one inbox rather than separate tools.

Contact

The identity record for a person, holding every channel identifier they use — phone, email, WhatsApp, Instagram — so one customer stays one record no matter how they get in touch. See contacts.

Copilot

AI that assists the human agent — summarizing threads, drafting replies, answering from the knowledge base — without sending anything until a person approves it. See Copilot.

CRM (customer relationship management)

The system of record for customers and accounts — who they are, what they bought, what they have asked before — used to inform both support and outbound engagement.

CSAT (customer satisfaction score)

A short post-resolution survey, usually a rating, that measures whether the customer was happy with how a specific interaction went.

Customer journey

A lifecycle automation centered on a contact rather than a ticket — enrolling on an event (a purchase, a signup, a support resolution) and running over days or weeks, not just replying once. See customer journeys.

D

Deflection rate

The share of incoming conversations resolved without a human agent touching them — usually by an AI agent, a knowledge base article, or a self-service flow.

E

External API

The API-key-authenticated surface that lets outside systems (and Samvaad MCP) read and act on tickets, conversations, contacts, and journeys without a logged-in user session. See MCP and APIs.

F

First response time (FRT)

How long a customer waits between sending a message and getting the first reply — one of the most commonly tracked support SLAs, and often more visible to the customer than resolution time.

H

Handoff

The moment an AI agent passes a conversation to a human, carrying a summary of what has happened so the customer never has to repeat themselves.

Helpdesk

The ticketing side of support software — owners, statuses, SLAs, and a formal record of support work — as distinct from the conversational, channel-native side (the inbox).

I

Inbox

The unified, channel-agnostic workspace where agents see and reply to every conversation — WhatsApp, email, widget chat, social DMs, calls — in one queue. See the inbox.

IVR (interactive voice response)

The menu system a caller navigates before reaching a queue or an agent — "press 1 for billing" — often paired with voice AI for simple requests.

K

Knowledge base (KB)

The library of articles that agents, Copilot, and AI agents all read from for grounded answers, so customer-facing AI is not guessing from the open web. See knowledge base.

L

Lead capture

Collecting a prospect's contact details in exchange for something of value — a guide, a calculator result, interest in a demo — as the first step of a sales or marketing relationship.

M

Macro / quick reply

A saved, reusable response template an agent can insert with one click, for the questions that come up often enough to not retype.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open protocol for connecting AI clients (like Claude Desktop or Cursor) to external tools. A Samvaad MCP server exposes tickets, conversations, contacts, and more as callable tools, scoped by API key. See Samvaad MCP.

Merge

Combining two records that turned out to be the same thing — usually two contacts, or two tickets opened for one issue — into one, without losing either history.

Multi-tenant

An architecture where one platform serves many separate customers (tenants), each with isolated data, on shared infrastructure — as opposed to a separate install per customer.

O

Occupancy

The share of an agent's available time actually spent handling conversations, as opposed to idle or on break — a workload metric distinct from raw ticket volume.

Omnichannel

Support where every channel feeds one system with one customer history, rather than separate tools per channel that never talk to each other. The word gets overused; the test is whether an agent sees the full picture on any channel a customer picks.

Outbox pattern

A backend reliability pattern where side effects (sending a notification, firing a webhook) are recorded transactionally with the triggering change, then delivered asynchronously — so a slow downstream system never blocks or loses the original action.

P

Plan gating

Restricting a feature (campaigns, voice, SSO, AI agents) to certain subscription tiers, enforced consistently in both the interface and the backend API.

Portal

A branded, customer-facing web experience where a customer can log in, view their own tickets, and search the knowledge base — separate from the internal agent workspace.

Prospect

Someone who has registered interest in a product but is not yet a customer — the record a "sign up" or "request a demo" form usually creates.

Q

Queue

A shared pool of conversations or tickets that any eligible agent can pick up, as opposed to a personal inbox — the basis of most routing and workload-balancing.

Quality assurance (QA)

Reviewing closed conversations against a rubric — tone, accuracy, policy adherence — to coach agents and catch systemic issues before they show up in CSAT.

R

RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)

An AI pattern where the model retrieves relevant passages (usually from a knowledge base) before generating an answer, so responses are grounded in your actual documentation instead of the model's general training.

RBAC (role-based access control)

Restricting what a user can see or do based on their assigned role and permissions — enforced with module and action semantics like read, write, delete, and manage.

Resolution time

How long a ticket stays open from creation to close — the counterpart to first response time, and usually the SLA customers feel most when it slips.

S

SLA (service-level agreement)

A committed target — usually a time limit on first response or resolution — with an internal clock that flags a ticket as "breaching soon" or "breached."

Store integration

A connection to a commerce platform (Shopify, WooCommerce) so store events — an order, a cart abandonment, a refund — can trigger journeys or appear as context beside a ticket.

Subdomain

The unique address a tenant's workspace lives at (yourcompany.samvaads.com) — generated from the company name at signup.

T

Tenant

One customer's isolated workspace within a multi-tenant platform — its own data, users, and configuration, invisible to every other tenant.

Ticket

A formal unit of support work with an owner, a status, and an SLA clock — related to, but distinct from, the conversation it may have started from. See tickets.

Transcript

The written record of a voice call or conversation, often auto-generated, used for QA, search, and feeding AI answers.

U

Unified inbox

See inbox — a single queue across every channel, rather than a separate screen per channel.

V

Voice

Cloud telephony brought into the same workspace as chat and email — inbound and outbound calls, IVR, queues, transfers, and recordings alongside every other channel. See voice.

W

WABA (WhatsApp Business API)

The official, business-grade WhatsApp integration (as opposed to the consumer app) that supports templated messages, multiple agents, and platform connections like Samvaads.

Webhook

An outbound HTTP call your system fires when something happens in Samvaads, so an external system can react without polling for changes.

Widget

The embeddable chat window you place on your own website, connecting visitors straight into the same inbox as every other channel.

Workflow

A richer, event-driven action orchestration than a classic automation — can call AI, external tools, and multiple steps in sequence, not just a single trigger-action pair.

Z

Zero-touch resolution

A conversation resolved entirely by an AI agent or self-service, with no human agent ever needing to look at it.