To keep up with the latest trends and join in conversations about best practices, you have to know your machine learning from your IVR — and everything in between. To complicate matters further, new technologies are constantly being developed, so how do you know which ones are worth adding to your personal lexicon … and which ones are just noise?
Good news: We’ve put together definitions of the top terms you need to know to be a customer engagement superstar in 2018. Read them, learn them, and bookmark this page so you can refer back to them again and again. If you’re looking for THE definitive guide to CX terminology, this is it:
- AI (Artificial Intelligence): Artificial intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
- ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition): Technology that allows human beings to use their voices to speak with a computer interface in a way that, in its most sophisticated variations, resembles a normal human conversation. The most advanced version of ASR technologies revolves around what is called Natural Language Processing (NLP).
- BD (Big Data): BD refers to the act of processing and working with the insights you can draw from the large data pools that are available today.
- BI (Business Intelligence): The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business-information. The purpose of BI is to support better business-decision making.
- BPM (Business Process Management): BPM is a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyse measure, improve, optimise, and automate business processes. BPM focuses on improving corporate performance by managing business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company’s business processes is BPM.
- CCCM (Cross-Channel Communication Management): CCCM applications that enable marketers to act on and react to empowered customers rather than just integrate more channels. In the future, marketers will select applications for their ability to orchestrate the always on, bidirectional, and cross-channel dialogue between customers and businesses.
- Channel: Also referred to as Message channel or Route. A physical connection to a mobile network used by Engage Hub to send or receive messages. In the context of Engage Hub feature list, the term ‘channel’ may also be used to indicate a type of interaction with end users, e.g. SMS, Landing Page, email, etc.
- Chatbot: A chatbot is a computer programme that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to imitate human conversations – this can be through voice commands, text or both. In other words, chatbots have the potential to help every department become more efficient – while enhancing the customer experience and spreading the word about your products.
- CM (Content Management): CM is a set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referred to as digital content, or simply as content.
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management): CRM is a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving customer service relationships and assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth.
- CSV (Comma Separated Values): CSV is a delimited data format that has fields/columns separated by the comma character, and records/rows separated by newlines. CSV is used as a way of storing information in a text file so that it can be passed between different computer systems and applications.
- CTR (Click-Through Rate): CTR is a term that has been around pretty much since the existence of online ads. It is the number of clicks on a given ad divided by the number of impressions.
- CX (Customer Experience): CX is the product of an interaction between an organisation and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences (including digital environment) during their experience.
- DMP (Data Management Platform): A data management platform (DMP), also referred to as a unified data management platform (UDMP), is a centralised system for collecting and analysing large sets of data originating from disparate sources. A DMP creates a combined development and delivery environment that provides users with consistent, accurate and timely data. A key role of a data management platform is to collect structured and unstructured data from a range of internal and external sources, and to then integrate and store that data.
- EMSS (Enterprise Marketing Software Suites): EMSS can be defined as an integrated portfolio of marketing technology products that provide analytics, orchestration, and execution of insight-driven customer interactions to support inbound and outbound marketing. EMSS drives benefits such as procuring multiple martech components from a single vendor, reducing data and content handoffs, linking systems of insight and engagement, and allowing integrated functionality to enable customer interactions across channels and devices.
- ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): ERP is a process where a company, often a manufacturer, manages and integrates the important parts of its business. An ERP management information system integrates areas such as planning, purchasing, inventory, sales, marketing, finance and human resources. ERP is most frequently used in the context of software, with many large software applications having been developed to help companies implement ERP.
- EMT (Enterprise Marketing Technology): Enterprise marketing management defines a category of software used by marketing operations to manage their end-to-end internal processes. EMM is a subset of Marketing Technologies which consist of a total of 3 key technology types that allow for corporations and customers to participate in a holistic and real-time marketing campaign.
- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation): GDPR refers to a data protection regulation applicable to all country members of the European Union, which is intended to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the EU. Dedicated customer record management features are available in the Engage Hub platform for the purpose of making it compliant with this regulation. You can find a full statement in this link – https://engagehub.com/gdpr-statement
- GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications): Global System for Mobile Communications, (originally Groupe Spécial Mobile). The method used to send and receive SMS messages in most countries.
- IVR (Conversational Interactive Voice Response): Conversational IVR applications automate voice-based customer service inquiries using speech recognition technology, whereas traditional IVR applications rely on touchtone input. Due to its ability to process natural spoken language, conversational IVR applications provide a superior customer experience.
- KPI (Key Performance Indications): This variant of ASR comes the closest to allowing real conversation between people and machine intelligence. Our voice solutions use the latest NLP technology to allow customers to interact with a business in the most natural way. This automation means that businesses reduce the amount of time call centre agents spend to try to resolve a query as customers can self-serve information and be routed to the appropriate group of agents.
- Messaging Apps: To use chatbots, you need to use communication applications – common messaging apps include Facebook Messenger, SMS, WeChat or voice (Amazon Alexa, for example).
- ML (Machine Learning): Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that can access data to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed.
- MNO (Mobile Network Operators): A mobile network operator or MNO, also known as a wireless service provider, wireless carrier, cellular company, or mobile network carrier, is a provider of wireless communications services. Some examples are; Telefonica, 02 & Three.
- NLP (Natural Language Processing): This variant of ASR comes the closest to allowing real conversation between people and machine intelligence. Our voice solutions use the latest NLP technology to allow customers to interact with a business in the most natural way. This automation means that businesses reduce the amount of time call centre agents spend to try to resolve a query as customers can self-serve information and be routed to the appropriate group of agents.
- PPC (Pay-Per-Click): PPC is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. In contrast, content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
- RPC (Remote Procedure Code): RPC is a communication initiated by an account application, which sends a request message to a known remote server to execute a certain procedure, e.g. update a database record with certain parameters. The remote server sends a response back, and the application continues its process.
- RTIM (Real-Time Interaction Management): RTIM is an umbrella term to describe the phenomenon of delivering contextually relevant marketing to users across devices. As customers come to expect highly personalised digital experiences, real-time interaction management has emerged as one of the top trends in marketing technology. Furthermore, advances in machine-learning have greatly improved marketers’ ability to act on their vast datasets, taking RTIM from pipe dream to reality. RTIM can be broken into five key functional areas: recognition, context, offer, orchestration and optimisation.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): SEO is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine‘s unpaid result – often referred to as “natural”, “organic“, or “earned” results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page) and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can then be converted into customers.
- SR (Speech Recognition): Applications that allow callers to use their voice instead of touchtone prompts to process simple transactions or direct the system to route their call to the appropriate group of agents. By prompting the caller-directed dialogue, applications try to narrow the range of words a caller will use, thereby reducing the resources needed to properly recognise the caller’s intent. Full natural-language systems allow for a much broader range of words and phrases a caller uses to process their request but require much higher development investments and more extensive ongoing tuning.
- UGC (User Generated Content): UGC is any form of content created by users of a system or service and made available publicly on that system. UGC most often appears as supplements to online platforms, such as social media websites, and may include such content types as blog posts, wikis, videos, comments or e-commerce.
- VA (Virtual Agents): Virtual agents are software services that use either deterministic decision trees or natural language processing and artificial intelligence to provide automated assistance by simulating a two-way conversation with customers via speech.
- WCM (Web Content Management): A WCM is a system designed to support the management of the content of Web pages. Most popular content management systems are also web content management systems. Web content includes text and embedded graphics, photos, video, audio, maps, and program code (e.g., for applications) that displays content or interacts with the user.
