The Customer Issue Resolution Glossary
An A–Z of the terms support, engineering, and CX teams use between a customer's first message and the fix that ships.
A
- Agentic InvestigationAn AI agent working a ticket the way an engineer would: hypothesis, evidence, conclusion.AI & Automation
- AI AgentSoftware that plans, uses tools, and acts toward a goal instead of answering one prompt.AI & Automation
- Average Handle Time (AHT)The average time an agent spends actively working a ticket, from open to wrap-up.Metrics
B
C
- Cannot ReproduceThe status a ticket gets when engineering can't make the bug happen on their side.Escalations
- ChatbotA conversational interface that answers customer questions, usually from fixed docs.AI & Automation
- Customer Effort Score (CES)How hard the customer had to work to get their issue resolved.Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)The share of customers who rate a support interaction as good after it closes.Metrics
D
E
- Engineering EscalationA ticket support hands to engineering because it needs code-level investigation.Escalations
- Escalation PathThe defined route a ticket follows when the current owner can't resolve it.Escalations
- Escalation RateThe percentage of tickets support can't resolve without another team.Metrics
F
- Feature FlagA switch that turns code paths on or off per customer without a deploy.Engineering
- First Contact Resolution (FCR)The share of tickets resolved in the first reply, with no follow-up needed.Metrics
- First Response Time (FRT)How long a customer waits for the first human or agent reply to a ticket.Metrics
- Follow-the-Sun SupportPassing open tickets between teams in different time zones for 24-hour coverage.Support Operations
G
H
- HallucinationWhen an AI model states something confident and wrong.AI & Automation
- HandoffPassing ownership of a ticket from one person or team to another.Support Operations
- HotfixAn urgent fix shipped outside the normal release cycle.Engineering
- Human-in-the-LoopA design where people review or approve an AI's work at key points.AI & Automation
I
J
K
L
M
- Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)The average time between an alert or ticket and someone taking ownership.Metrics
- Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)The average time from when an issue is reported to when it's fixed.Metrics
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)An open standard for connecting AI models to tools and data sources.AI & Automation
N
O
P
Q
R
- RegressionA bug where something that used to work stops working after a change.Engineering
- Reopen RateThe share of solved tickets customers reopen because the issue wasn't fixed.Metrics
- Reproduction (Repro)Making a reported bug happen again on purpose to confirm and study it.Escalations
- Resolution TimeElapsed time from a ticket's creation to its final resolution.Metrics
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Having an AI model look up relevant documents before generating an answer.AI & Automation
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA)Finding the underlying reason a problem happened, not just its symptoms.Engineering
- RunbookStep-by-step instructions for handling a known situation.Knowledge
S
- Service Level Agreement (SLA)A contractual commitment on response or resolution times.Support Operations
- Service Level Objective (SLO)An internal reliability target, like 99.9% of requests succeeding.Engineering
- Severity LevelA rating of how much harm an issue is causing, from outage to cosmetic.Escalations
- Status PageA public page reporting current service health and active incidents.Support Operations
- Support EngineerA support role that investigates technical issues with engineering-level skills.Support Operations
- SwarmingPulling the right experts onto a hard ticket together instead of passing it up tiers.Support Operations
T
- Technical SupportSupport for products where answers depend on code, config, and system behavior.Support Operations
- Ticket RoutingAutomatically sending each ticket to the right queue, team, or person.Support Operations
- Ticket TriageSorting incoming tickets by type, urgency, and owner before work begins.Support Operations
- Tiered Support (L1, L2, L3)A support structure where harder issues move up through levels of expertise.Support Operations
- Tribal KnowledgeKnow-how that lives in people's heads instead of in any document.Knowledge