# The Customer Issue Resolution Glossary

> Definitions of the support, escalation, engineering, and AI terms teams use to resolve technical customer issues, from MTTR and triage to RAG and root cause analysis.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

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 Investigation](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/agentic-investigation): An AI agent working a ticket the way an engineer would: hypothesis, evidence, conclusion.
- [AI Agent](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/ai-agent): Software that plans, uses tools, and acts toward a goal instead of answering one prompt.
- [Average Handle Time (AHT)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/average-handle-time): The average time an agent spends actively working a ticket, from open to wrap-up.

## B

- [Backlog](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/backlog): Open tickets waiting on someone, and the clearest early sign a team is underwater.
- [Bug Report](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/bug-report): A write-up of unexpected behavior with enough detail for an engineer to reproduce it.

## C

- [Cannot Reproduce](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/cannot-reproduce): The status a ticket gets when engineering can't make the bug happen on their side.
- [Chatbot](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/chatbot): A conversational interface that answers customer questions, usually from fixed docs.
- [Customer Effort Score (CES)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/customer-effort-score): How hard the customer had to work to get their issue resolved.
- [Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/csat): The share of customers who rate a support interaction as good after it closes.

## D

- [Deflection Rate](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/deflection-rate): The share of customer questions resolved without a human support agent.
- [Distributed Tracing](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/distributed-tracing): Following one request across every service it touches, with timing for each hop.

## E

- [Engineering Escalation](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/engineering-escalation): A ticket support hands to engineering because it needs code-level investigation.
- [Escalation Path](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/escalation-path): The defined route a ticket follows when the current owner can't resolve it.
- [Escalation Rate](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/escalation-rate): The percentage of tickets support can't resolve without another team.

## F

- [Feature Flag](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/feature-flag): A switch that turns code paths on or off per customer without a deploy.
- [First Contact Resolution (FCR)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/first-contact-resolution): The share of tickets resolved in the first reply, with no follow-up needed.
- [First Response Time (FRT)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/first-response-time): How long a customer waits for the first human or agent reply to a ticket.
- [Follow-the-Sun Support](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/follow-the-sun): Passing open tickets between teams in different time zones for 24-hour coverage.

## G

- [Grounding](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/grounding): Tying an AI's answer to specific source material it can cite.

## H

- [Hallucination](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/hallucination): When an AI model states something confident and wrong.
- [Handoff](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/handoff): Passing ownership of a ticket from one person or team to another.
- [Hotfix](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/hotfix): An urgent fix shipped outside the normal release cycle.
- [Human-in-the-Loop](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/human-in-the-loop): A design where people review or approve an AI's work at key points.

## I

- [Incident](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/incident): An unplanned disruption or degradation of a service that needs an urgent response.
- [Internal Note](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/internal-note): A private comment on a ticket, visible to the team but not the customer.

## J

- [Just-in-Time Access (JIT)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/just-in-time-access): Temporary, scoped access to production systems, granted only when an investigation needs it.

## K

- [Knowledge Base](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/knowledge-base): A library of help articles customers and agents use to answer questions.
- [Known Issue](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/known-issue): A confirmed bug that's been acknowledged but not yet fixed.

## L

- [Logs](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/logs): Timestamped records of events a system emits as it runs.

## M

- [Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/mtta): The average time between an alert or ticket and someone taking ownership.
- [Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/mttr): The average time from when an issue is reported to when it's fixed.
- [Model Context Protocol (MCP)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/model-context-protocol): An open standard for connecting AI models to tools and data sources.

## N

- [Net Promoter Score (NPS)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/net-promoter-score): How likely customers are to recommend you, scored from −100 to 100.

## O

- [Observability](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/observability): How well you can understand a system's internal state from the data it emits.
- [On-Call](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/on-call): The rotation of engineers responsible for responding to urgent issues.

## P

- [Postmortem](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/postmortem): A blameless review of what went wrong and how to prevent it recurring.
- [Priority](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/priority): How soon a ticket should be worked, relative to everything else.

## Q

- [Queue](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/queue): A list of tickets waiting to be picked up by a team or agent.

## R

- [Regression](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/regression): A bug where something that used to work stops working after a change.
- [Reopen Rate](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/reopen-rate): The share of solved tickets customers reopen because the issue wasn't fixed.
- [Reproduction (Repro)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/reproduction): Making a reported bug happen again on purpose to confirm and study it.
- [Resolution Time](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/resolution-time): Elapsed time from a ticket's creation to its final resolution.
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/retrieval-augmented-generation): Having an AI model look up relevant documents before generating an answer.
- [Root Cause Analysis (RCA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/root-cause-analysis): Finding the underlying reason a problem happened, not just its symptoms.
- [Runbook](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/runbook): Step-by-step instructions for handling a known situation.

## S

- [Service Level Agreement (SLA)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/sla): A contractual commitment on response or resolution times.
- [Service Level Objective (SLO)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/slo): An internal reliability target, like 99.9% of requests succeeding.
- [Severity Level](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/severity-level): A rating of how much harm an issue is causing, from outage to cosmetic.
- [Status Page](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/status-page): A public page reporting current service health and active incidents.
- [Support Engineer](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/support-engineer): A support role that investigates technical issues with engineering-level skills.
- [Swarming](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/swarming): Pulling the right experts onto a hard ticket together instead of passing it up tiers.

## T

- [Technical Support](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/technical-support): Support for products where answers depend on code, config, and system behavior.
- [Ticket Routing](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/ticket-routing): Automatically sending each ticket to the right queue, team, or person.
- [Ticket Triage](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/ticket-triage): Sorting incoming tickets by type, urgency, and owner before work begins.
- [Tiered Support (L1, L2, L3)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/tiered-support): A support structure where harder issues move up through levels of expertise.
- [Tribal Knowledge](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/tribal-knowledge): Know-how that lives in people's heads instead of in any document.

## U

- [Uptime](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/uptime): The share of time a service is available and working, usually shown as a percentage.

## V

- [Voice of the Customer (VoC)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/voice-of-the-customer): Systematically collecting what customers say, need, and complain about, and routing it to product.

## W

- [Workaround](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/workaround): A temporary way for a customer to get unblocked before a real fix ships.

## X

- [X-Request-ID](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/x-request-id): An HTTP header carrying a unique ID for one request, so it can be found in logs later.

## Y

- [YAML Configuration](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/yaml-configuration): Human-readable config files that define how software and infrastructure behave.

## Z

- [Zero-Touch Resolution](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/zero-touch-resolution): A ticket resolved end to end without any human working on it.

---

Decimal · Book a demo: https://cal.com/decimal-demo/30m · Markdown index: https://www.decimal.app/llms.txt