Customer Experience Jargon Buster

Are you drowning in a sea of CX (customer experience) jargon and feeling a little bamboozled by smart data, personalisation, the Internet of Things (IoT) and customer journey mapping? Our CX Jargon Buster provides some quick definitions of the latest terms used in the world of customer experience. 

Co-creation

Co-creation is the process of a business and its customers coming together to produce a mutually valued outcome, and improve the way the relationship works. For example, customers and companies can unite to invoke change in a broken customer service process or develop a new market offering. Co-creation recognises the vital contribution customers can make to an organisation’s knowledge and ability to innovate.

CX

CX (sometimes referred to as CEX) is an abbreviation for customer experience, and is the experience a customer has with an organisation and its product(s) or service(s), which can be measured over the course of the entire relationship, or at a specific stage in the customer journey.Customer experience encompasses all touchpoints, which may include a customer’s interactions with a contact centre, website, social media, mobile, video or face-to-face channels.

CX Index™

The CX Index is a customer experience measurement and decision tool developed by global analyst firm Forrester. It measures and models CX with a view to identifying “the best actions to produce the best results”.

CEM

Cutting across marketing, digital and sales & service silos, CEM (Customer Experience Management) is an organisational discipline dedicated to mapping, designing and delivering an optimal customer experience, from the point of attracting customers right through to post-sale service.

Customer Experience Scorecard

A customer experience scorecard is a snapshot of quantifiable KPIs (eg. Net Promoter Score, First Contact Resolution) which an organisation measures to track its CX performance. Different KPIs may be assigned different weightings to give a balanced overall score.

Customer Journey Map

customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s end-to-end experience with a product or service.  Creating these maps unlocks the customer’s perspective on the way an organisation does business, often revealing unfriendly or duplicate processes and lost sales opportunities.

CLV

CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is the profit, expressed in dollar terms, which a business predicts a customer will be worth over the term of the customer relationship. Marketers rely on this figure to determine maximum spend to acquire a customer.

CRM

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is the approach an organisation takes to managing the relationship with its customers and prospective customers. CRM is also the term used for the technology platform enabling this approach – typically in a sales, service or marketing setting. 

IoT

IoT (the Internet of Things) refers to physical devices, such as computers, phones and wearables that can connect to each other through the internet.

EFM

EFM stands for Enterprise Feedback Management and is a way of systematically capturing feedback from customers, employees, vendors and partners, and managing this feedback through a software platform. Feedback can be garnered from the public domain (such as social media) or one-on-one surveys.

NPS®

Net Promoter ScoreSM (NPS®) is the most popular customer experience metric measured by companies around the world. NPS uses a scale of 0 to 10 to divide customers into one of three groups: detractors (0-6), passives (7-8) and promoters. NPS is calculated by deducting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The score is based on the customer’s likelihood to recommend to family or a colleague, and is a predictor of customer loyalty and retention.

Predictive personalisation

Predictive personalisation allows organisations to analyse data to predict customer behaviour and needs, and customise the experience of individual customers accordingly. 

PURL

PURLs are personalised URLs which a company may give to its customers to bring up a personalised landing page or offer. PURLs are said to increase conversion rates by 30%.

Speech analytics 

Speech analytics software analyses large volumes of calls between a customer and its call centre, with a view to unlocking customer insights and understanding why customers are dissatisfied. These insights are used by agile companies to inform marketing, operational and strategy decisions.  Speech analytics is also used to ensure compliance and measure performance of individual call centre agents.  

Smart Data

For several years, “big data” has been a popular term used to describe the mass volumes of data which an organisation collects in the course of doing business with customers. Now marketing and CX leaders are turning their attention to “smart data”, which involves extracting the data points from the “big data” which are critical to achieving business goals.

Last updated on: October 26, 2022