CX GLOSSARY

Customer Experience Glossary

Q: What is the difference between NPS, CSAT and CES?

NPS measures loyalty (would you recommend us?), CSAT measures satisfaction with a specific interaction, and CES measures how easy it was to get something done. Most programs combine them: a relationship NPS survey a few times a year, plus transactional CSAT or CES after key interactions such as a purchase or support call.

Q: What is a good NPS score?

Any NPS above 0 means you have more promoters than detractors. Above 30 is typically considered strong and above 50 excellent, but benchmarks vary widely by industry, region and survey method — comparing against your own trend and your best-performing branch is usually more useful than chasing a global average.

Q: What is SLI (Satisfaction Level Indicator)?

SLI is Qmeter's single customer-experience KPI, scored from −100 to 100. It is calculated as (Current case × 100) / Best case, comparing all collected feedback against the best possible result. Unlike NPS, which is built from one question, SLI uses every answer in every survey, so it reflects the whole measured experience.

Q: What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel feedback?

Multichannel means collecting feedback on several channels separately; omnichannel means those channels feed one unified system, so a kiosk complaint and an email complaint about the same branch are analyzed together. The difference is not the number of channels — it is the single, combined view of the customer.

Q: How many customer experience metrics should a business track?

Fewer than most businesses track. A practical set for a multi-location operator: one relationship metric (NPS or SLI), one transactional metric (CSAT or CES), response rate, and two operational metrics — first response time and resolution time. Everything else can stay on the analyst's dashboard rather than the management agenda.

This glossary defines 56 essential customer experience (CX) terms in plain English — from Net Promoter Score (NPS) and CSAT to closed-loop feedback and sentiment analysis. Each entry gives a short, quotable definition first, then the practical detail operators of multi-location businesses actually need.

Choosing between metrics? Start with our NPS vs CSAT vs CES comparison, see how the Satisfaction Level Indicator (SLI) turns every answer into one score, or browse all customer experience guides.

AI summarization

AI summarization condenses large volumes of open-ended customer feedback into short, readable summaries. Instead of reading thousands of comments, teams get the recurring themes, complaints and praise extracted automatically by a language model.

Summarization sits on top of text analytics: analytics counts and classifies, summarization explains. In practice a CX manager opens a branch report and reads three sentences — what customers praised, what they complained about, and what changed since last month. Qmeter applies AI summarization to open-ended answers so operators act on themes, not anecdotes.

Benchmarking

CX benchmarking compares your customer experience metrics — NPS, CSAT, SLI — against your own history, other branches, or industry averages. It turns a raw number into context: a score of 72 means little until you know your best branch scores 85.

For multi-location businesses, internal benchmarking is usually more actionable than industry tables: the same brand, offer and prices across branches isolates the one variable that differs — local execution. External benchmarks vary widely by industry, region and survey method, so treat published averages as orientation, not targets.

Closed-loop feedback

Closed-loop feedback is the practice of responding to every piece of customer feedback: acknowledging it, resolving the issue, and telling the customer what changed. The loop closes when the customer knows their input led to action.

Most feedback programs fail at the loop, not the collection: scores are gathered, charted and forgotten. Closing the loop requires three mechanics — a ticket for every negative response, an owner with a deadline, and a follow-up message to the customer. Done consistently, it converts complainers into repeat customers and staff into problem-solvers.

Cohort analysis

Cohort analysis groups customers by a shared starting point — sign-up month, first visit, onboarding batch — and tracks how each group's satisfaction or retention changes over time. It separates real trends from noise caused by mixing new and long-standing customers.

An average CSAT that looks stable can hide a problem: veterans rating you highly while every new cohort rates you worse. Cohorts expose that decay early. The technique matters most after changes — a new branch process, a price increase, a redesigned onboarding — because it shows exactly which generation of customers felt the difference.

Correlation vs causation (in CX)

Correlation means two CX metrics move together; causation means one actually drives the other. Longer wait times may correlate with lower CSAT, but only controlled comparison — same branch, same service, different wait — shows whether cutting waits truly raises satisfaction.

The classic trap: satisfaction and spend correlate, so teams conclude satisfaction causes spend — when often loyal high-spenders are simply treated better. Before investing on the basis of a correlation, test it: change one variable in a few locations and compare against the rest. Key driver analysis suggests candidates; experiments confirm them.

CSAT scale

A CSAT scale is the rating range used in a satisfaction question — most commonly 1–5 from very dissatisfied to very satisfied, sometimes 1–3, 1–7, stars or smiley faces. Whatever the choice, the scale must stay consistent over time or scores stop being comparable.

Shorter scales (smileys, 1–3) raise response rates on kiosks and phones because they take under a second to answer; longer scales capture more nuance in email surveys. The percentage of respondents choosing the top ratings — the top-2-box score — is the standard way to turn any scale into one number.

Customer churn

Customer churn is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you over a given period. Churn rate = (customers lost ÷ customers at the start of the period) × 100. It is the direct financial consequence of poor customer experience.

Churn is a lagging indicator — by the time it moves, the damage is months old. Feedback metrics exist to catch it earlier: a detractor score, a drop in visit frequency, an unresolved complaint. That is why serious CX programs pair churn tracking with real-time alerts and win-back campaigns rather than reading churn reports after the fact.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it was for a customer to get something done — resolve an issue, open an account, return a product. It is typically asked as “How easy was it to…?” on a 1–7 scale. Lower effort predicts higher loyalty.

CES works best immediately after service interactions, where effort is the dominant memory: queues, forms, transfers between departments. It complements CSAT (how pleasant was it) and NPS (how loyal are you) by asking the operational question — how hard did we make it? High-effort moments are usually the cheapest CX problems to fix.

Customer Experience Management (CEM / CXM)

Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is the discipline of measuring and improving every interaction a customer has with a business — across channels, branches and departments — so the overall experience drives retention instead of churn.

CXM connects four activities into one operating system: collect feedback everywhere customers are, analyze it centrally, route problems to the people who can fix them, and verify the fix changed the numbers. It differs from market research in tempo — CXM runs continuously on live transactions, not quarterly on samples.

Customer journey

The customer journey is the full sequence of interactions a customer has with a business — from first discovery through purchase, service, support and renewal. CX teams analyze journeys to find the moments that create loyalty and the ones that cause churn.

Journeys cut across departments, which is why they expose problems org charts hide: marketing promises, sales confirms, operations under-delivers, support absorbs the anger. Measuring satisfaction at each journey stage — not just at the end — shows where the experience actually breaks.

Related:Customer journey map Touchpoint

Customer journey map

A customer journey map is a visual diagram of every stage, touchpoint, action and emotion in the customer journey. It shows where customers struggle, where they drop off, and where feedback should be collected.

A useful map is built from evidence — feedback data, complaint logs, observed behaviour — not from a workshop's best guesses. Its practical output is a measurement plan: which touchpoints get a transactional survey, which get a kiosk, which feed the relationship survey. A map nobody instruments is wall art.

Customer retention

Customer retention is the percentage of existing customers who stay with you over a period. Retention rate = ((customers at end − new customers acquired) ÷ customers at start) × 100. It is the mirror image of churn and the primary financial output of good CX.

Retention responds to experience with a delay, so manage its leading indicators: complaint resolution speed, detractor share, repeat-visit frequency. Retaining a customer costs a conversation; replacing one costs a marketing budget — which is why feedback programs are usually judged, ultimately, on retention.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures how satisfied customers are with a specific interaction, product or service, usually on a 1–5 scale. CSAT = (satisfied responses ÷ total responses) × 100, where “satisfied” means the top one or two ratings.

CSAT is the workhorse of transactional measurement: ask it right after a visit, delivery or support call and it tells you how that moment went. Its weakness is scope — it says nothing about overall loyalty, which is what NPS and relationship surveys cover. Track CSAT per branch and per touchpoint, not as one blended company number.

Customer segmentation

Customer segmentation divides customers into groups that share traits — location, product, spend level, visit frequency, demographics — so feedback can be analyzed per group. A single average hides the fact that new customers and loyal regulars rarely experience the same service.

In feedback analysis, the most valuable segments are usually behavioural: first-time vs repeat, high-value vs occasional, digital-only vs branch visitors. Segment before you conclude — a flat overall NPS often decomposes into rising scores in one segment and falling scores in another, each demanding a different fix.

CX dashboard

A CX dashboard displays customer experience metrics — NPS, CSAT, SLI, response volumes, open tickets, resolution times — in one live view. Operators use it to compare branches, spot declining scores and act before small issues become churn.

A good dashboard is organized around decisions, not data: which branch needs attention today, which tickets are overdue, which score moved and why. Qmeter's dashboards are built for this operator view — branch comparison, live feedback streams and ticket status in one place rather than a monthly slide deck.

Detractor

A detractor is a customer who answers 0–6 on the NPS question “How likely are you to recommend us?”. Detractors are at risk of churning and of discouraging others; NPS subtracts their percentage from the percentage of promoters.

Every detractor response is a service-recovery opportunity with a countdown attached — contact within hours and the relationship is often repairable; wait a week and it usually is not. That is why detractor answers should open a ticket and trigger an alert automatically, not sit in a spreadsheet until the next review meeting.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement is the level of commitment, energy and involvement employees bring to their work — beyond mere satisfaction. Engaged employees serve customers better, stay longer and improve faster; disengagement shows up first in staff turnover and soon after in customer scores.

Engagement is measured, not guessed: regular pulse surveys, eNPS and an open question reveal how each team actually feels. The front line is where engagement and customer experience meet — the same shift that produces low employee scores usually produces low customer scores, which is the argument for reading both on one platform.

Employee Experience (EX)

Employee experience (EX) is the sum of everything an employee encounters at work — tools, management, environment, culture. It is measured with the same instruments as CX, such as pulse surveys and eNPS, because dissatisfied employees rarely deliver satisfying customer service.

The operational link between EX and CX is the front line: the branch teller, the waiter, the nurse at reception. Where employee feedback and customer feedback are collected on the same platform, managers can see both sides of the same shift — a capability multi-location operators increasingly ask for. Qmeter runs employee surveys — engagement, pulse, onboarding and exit — alongside customer feedback in one system.

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)

Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) applies the NPS method to staff: employees answer “How likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work?” on a 0–10 scale. eNPS = % promoters (9–10) − % detractors (0–6), giving a score from −100 to +100.

eNPS scores run lower than customer NPS almost everywhere — employees judge their workplace more critically than customers judge a visit — so compare against your own trend, not against customer benchmarks. Anonymity is the precondition: staff who suspect answers are traceable inflate their scores, and the metric quietly dies. Run it quarterly with one or two follow-up questions, and treat a falling eNPS as a leading indicator for both staff turnover and customer scores.

Escalation

An escalation moves an unresolved customer issue to someone with more authority or expertise — from front-line staff to a branch manager, or from support to a specialist team. Modern CX platforms escalate automatically when a ticket breaches response-time or severity rules.

Escalation rules turn service standards into software: if a negative feedback ticket is untouched for four hours, the branch manager is notified; untouched for a day, the regional director. The point is not blame — it is guaranteeing that no angry customer waits on one person's inbox.

Exit interview

An exit interview or exit survey collects feedback from an employee who is leaving — why they resigned, what they would change, and whether they would return or recommend the employer. Departing employees have little reason to self-censor, which makes exit feedback unusually candid.

Treat it like CX measurement, not paperwork: a short structured survey for comparable trends, one open question for the real story, and themes routed to management the way negative customer feedback is routed to tickets. Read exit themes against pulse-survey history — the warning was usually visible months earlier. The same logic applies to customers: surveying on the way out is what makes win-back campaigns specific.

Feedback loop

A feedback loop is the repeating cycle of collecting customer feedback, analyzing it, acting on it, and measuring whether the action worked. The tighter the loop — hours instead of quarters — the faster service improves.

Loops fail at predictable points: collection without analysis (data graveyard), analysis without action (report culture), action without re-measurement (nobody knows if it worked). Auditing where your loop breaks is the fastest health check a CX program can run.

Feedback ticketing

Feedback ticketing converts a piece of negative customer feedback into a trackable task — a ticket — assigned to the person who can fix it, with a deadline and a status. It is the mechanism that turns closed-loop feedback from intention into process.

Without tickets, feedback response depends on whoever happens to read the report; with tickets, it has an owner, an SLA and an audit trail. Qmeter creates tickets from feedback automatically and routes them by branch, topic or severity, so a cold meal complaint reaches the restaurant manager — not head office, three weeks later.

First response time

First response time (FRT) is how long a customer waits between raising an issue and receiving the first meaningful reply. It is a core service-level metric: a fast first response often matters as much to the customer as the eventual fix.

Customers judge silence harshly — an acknowledged problem feels handled even before it is solved. Set FRT targets per severity (minutes for an angry in-branch complaint, hours for a routine query) and let escalation rules enforce them automatically.

In-app feedback

In-app feedback is collected inside a mobile or web application while the customer is using it — through embedded micro-surveys, rating prompts or feedback buttons. Because context is captured at the moment of experience, responses are specific and immediately actionable.

The craft is in the trigger: ask after a completed action (payment sent, order placed), never during one, and cap frequency so the same user is not prompted twice in a month. In-app is one channel in an omnichannel program — it covers your digital customers and misses everyone else, which is what QR, SMS and kiosks are for.

Key driver analysis

Key driver analysis identifies which parts of the experience — wait time, staff friendliness, price, cleanliness — most strongly influence an overall score such as NPS or SLI. It tells you where to invest first for the largest satisfaction gain.

Statistically it is correlation or regression between attribute ratings and the headline metric; practically it is a ranked to-do list. Two cautions: drivers differ by segment and branch, and correlation is not proof — validate the top driver with a controlled change before rolling it out everywhere.

Kiosk feedback

Kiosk feedback is collected on a physical device — a tablet or terminal — placed at the point of service: a bank branch, hotel lobby, clinic reception or store exit. It captures reactions from walk-in customers whom email and SMS surveys never reach.

For businesses whose experience happens in a building, kiosks are the difference between measuring some customers and measuring the flow. Response takes seconds, no contact details are needed, and results map to a specific location and shift. Qmeter provides kiosk and tablet devices from €50 per device per month — physical collection is where most survey-only tools stop.

Likert scale

A Likert scale asks respondents to rate agreement with a statement across symmetric options — typically five or seven steps from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. It is the standard format for measuring attitudes in customer and employee surveys.

Likert items suit statements (“Staff resolved my issue quickly”), while CSAT-style scales suit direct ratings. Keep the scale balanced, label every point, and resist the urge to mix five- and seven-point items in one questionnaire — it complicates comparison later.

Related:CSAT scale Open-ended question

Mystery shopping

Mystery shopping uses trained evaluators posing as ordinary customers to score a service experience against a defined checklist. It measures whether standards are followed; customer feedback measures how the experience actually felt. Strong CX programs use both.

Mystery shopping answers compliance questions feedback cannot (was the greeting script used? was the upsell offered?), but it samples a handful of visits per month, while feedback samples thousands. Use mystery shopping to audit process and continuous feedback to measure outcome.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend you, on a 0–10 scale. NPS = % promoters (9–10) − % detractors (0–6), giving a score from −100 to +100. Passives (7–8) are counted in the total but not the formula.

NPS is the most widely used relationship metric because it is simple, comparable and correlates with growth intent. Its limits are equally known: it says who is unhappy, not why — which is what the follow-up open question, driver analysis and transactional metrics are for. Run it two to four times a year; more often invites fatigue.

Omnichannel feedback

Omnichannel feedback is customer feedback collected across every channel a business operates — web, email, SMS, QR codes, mobile apps, kiosks and in person — and unified in one system, so a complaint made at a kiosk and one sent by email are analyzed together.

The word that matters is unified: running five disconnected survey tools is multichannel, not omnichannel. One customer, one profile, one score — regardless of where the feedback originated. Qmeter was built omnichannel-first, including the physical channels (kiosks, tablets, QR at point of service) that pure-digital survey tools leave out.

Onboarding survey

An onboarding survey measures a customer's experience during their first days or weeks — after account opening, first purchase or first visit. Early friction is a strong predictor of early churn, which makes this the highest-leverage transactional survey most businesses run.

Ask three things: was anything confusing, did anything take longer than expected, and did the product or service match what was promised. Answers arrive while the relationship is still forming — early enough for a phone call to change the outcome.

Open-ended question

An open-ended question lets customers answer in their own words instead of picking from a scale — for example, “What could we have done better?”. It produces the richest insight and the hardest data to analyze, which is why text analytics and AI summarization exist.

Scores tell you where the problem is; open text tells you what it is. Best practice: one open question per survey, placed after the rating, optional to answer. With AI handling classification and summarization, the old excuse for skipping open text — nobody will read it — no longer holds.

Passenger experience

Passenger experience (PX) is the end-to-end experience of travellers moving through an airport, airline or transport operator — arrival, check-in, security, wayfinding, waiting, boarding. Because dissatisfaction is moment-specific, PX is measured per touchpoint rather than with one overall survey.

Two drivers dominate most passenger feedback: how long things took and how easy it was to find the way. Measuring each checkpoint separately — kiosks after security, QR codes at gates and lounges — tells the operator which queue at which hour is the problem, instead of averaging a terminal into a single meaningless score.

Passive

A passive is a customer who answers 7 or 8 on the NPS scale — satisfied but unenthusiastic. Passives are excluded from the NPS formula, yet they matter: they switch to competitors more readily than promoters and are usually the cheapest group to convert.

Passives are the quiet middle: no complaint to recover, no enthusiasm to amplify. The practical play is to find what separates your 8s from your 9s — often one fixable attribute like speed or follow-through — and close that gap deliberately.

Promoter

A promoter is a customer who answers 9 or 10 on the NPS question “How likely are you to recommend us?”. Promoters are your most loyal customers and your primary source of referrals and positive reviews.

Promoters are an asset most programs never activate. Close the loop with them too: thank them, invite them to leave a public review, offer a referral path. A promoter asked to review at the right moment is worth more than most advertising the same money could buy.

Pulse survey

A pulse survey is a short, frequent survey — often one to three questions sent weekly or monthly — designed to track sentiment trends over time without causing survey fatigue. It is used for both customers and employees.

Pulses trade depth for frequency: you learn less per wave but see movement sooner. They work best when the questions stay identical between waves (so the trend is real) and when someone owns the follow-up — a pulse nobody acts on is just a recurring interruption.

QR code survey

A QR code survey opens when a customer scans a printed or on-screen QR code — on a receipt, table tent, poster, room card or badge. It needs no app, no hardware and no contact details, making it the fastest way to collect feedback at physical locations.

QR codes complement kiosks: a kiosk catches customers at the exit, QR reaches them at the table, in the room, on the invoice. Encode the location and touchpoint in each code so responses arrive pre-tagged — branch 12, checkout 3 — without asking the customer anything extra. Qmeter generates QR surveys as a standard collection channel.

Real-time alerts

Real-time alerts notify the right manager the moment a customer leaves negative feedback — by push notification, SMS or email — so service recovery starts within minutes instead of at the monthly report. Speed is the difference between an apology and a lost customer.

Alert design is about precision, not volume: route by branch and severity, so the duty manager gets the angry walk-out now and head office gets the weekly digest. Qmeter sends instant notifications on negative feedback and ties each alert to a ticket, so the alert is the start of a process rather than a notification that evaporates.

Relationship survey

A relationship survey measures a customer's overall opinion of your brand at regular intervals — typically quarterly or twice a year — independent of any single interaction. NPS is usually run as a relationship survey; CSAT and CES after individual transactions.

Relationship and transactional surveys answer different questions: how is the relationship trending, versus how did Tuesday's visit go. Mature programs run both and read them together — a healthy relationship score with falling transactional scores is an early warning, not a contradiction.

Resolution time

Resolution time is the total time from a customer raising an issue to that issue being fully fixed. Alongside first response time, it is a core service-level metric — and a common trigger for automatic escalation when limits are breached.

Measure it from the customer's clock, not the ticket system's: pauses, hand-offs and “pending” states all count as waiting to the person affected. Publishing internal resolution targets per issue type, then alerting on breaches, moves the metric more reliably than exhortation.

Response rate

Response rate is the percentage of invited customers who complete a survey: (completed responses ÷ invitations) × 100. Short surveys, good timing and the right channel raise it; low response rates make scores volatile and biased toward extreme opinions.

Channel choice moves response rates more than question wording: a kiosk at the exit or a QR on the receipt catches customers in the moment, while an email two days later competes with everything else in the inbox. Watch the trend as closely as the level — a falling response rate is often the first symptom of survey fatigue.

Review management

Review management is the practice of monitoring and responding to public customer reviews — on Google, TripAdvisor, app stores and social platforms. It complements private feedback: reviews shape what prospects see, while surveys tell you what to fix.

The two streams feed each other. Resolve complaints privately before they become public one-star reviews; invite verified promoters to review publicly. Responding to negative reviews — factually, briefly, without arguing — is read by future customers more than by the reviewer.

Satisfaction Level Indicator (SLI)

The Satisfaction Level Indicator (SLI) is Qmeter's single customer-experience KPI, scored from −100 to 100. SLI = (Current case × 100) / Best case: all collected feedback is compared against the best possible result, producing one trackable service-quality number.

Unlike NPS, which is built from one question, SLI uses every answer in every survey — each response option carries a score, and the total is benchmarked against the theoretical best. A score above 50 is excellent, 0–50 signals room to improve, and negative values demand urgent action. Because the formula is comparative, SLI works across branches, periods and industries.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis uses AI to classify text feedback as positive, negative or neutral — and increasingly to detect emotion, urgency and sarcasm. It lets teams quantify thousands of open-ended comments without reading each one individually.

Sentiment turns text into a metric you can trend and alert on: negative-sentiment spikes at one branch this week are actionable in a way a folder of comments is not. Pair it with topic detection — sentiment tells you the temperature, topics tell you what is burning.

Service recovery

Service recovery is the act of fixing a service failure well enough to keep the customer — a prompt acknowledgement, a genuine correction and, where warranted, compensation. Handled fast, recovery can leave a customer more loyal than before the failure; handled slowly, it rarely works.

Recovery is a race against the customer's decision to leave, which is why it depends on infrastructure: real-time alerts to hear the failure, ticketing to own it, and a follow-up message to close it. Empower the front line to resolve small failures on the spot — escalating a €10 problem through three approval layers is its own service failure.

Survey fatigue

Survey fatigue is the decline in response rate and answer quality that occurs when customers are surveyed too often, or with surveys that are too long. Symptoms: falling completion rates, straight-line answers and rising opt-outs. The cure: fewer, shorter, better-timed surveys.

Fatigue is self-inflicted measurement damage — every unnecessary question taxes the goodwill that future surveys depend on. Practical limits: transactional surveys under a minute, one open question, and suppression rules so the same customer is not asked twice in a short window.

Text analytics

Text analytics automatically extracts structure from open-ended feedback — topics, keywords, sentiment and trends — at a scale no team could read manually. It answers the question “what are thousands of customers actually talking about?” in seconds.

The output is a ranked list of themes with volumes and sentiment attached: parking (214 mentions, 78% negative), staff friendliness (890 mentions, 91% positive). That structure is what lets open text drive decisions instead of decorating reports. AI has collapsed the cost of doing this well, which changed the economics of open-ended questions.

Top-2-box score

A top-2-box score is the percentage of respondents who chose one of the two most positive options on a rating scale — for example, 4s and 5s on a five-point satisfaction question. It is the standard way to convert scale answers into a single satisfaction percentage.

Top-2-box rewards strong experiences and ignores lukewarm ones, which is usually the right bias — a customer who ticks the middle box is not actually satisfied. State the convention whenever you report CSAT, because a top-1-box and a top-2-box number from the same data can differ dramatically.

Touchpoint

A touchpoint is any single point of contact between a customer and a business: a branch visit, a phone call, an invoice, an app screen, a delivery, a queue. Customer journeys are made of touchpoints; feedback programs decide which ones to measure.

Not all touchpoints deserve a survey — instrument the ones where experience is won or lost: first contact, purchase, problem resolution, renewal. Each measured touchpoint should map to a channel that fits it: kiosk at the exit, QR on the receipt, email after support.

Transactional survey

A transactional survey is sent immediately after a specific interaction — a purchase, support call, delivery or branch visit — and asks about that event only. It produces precise, actionable feedback tied to a time, a place and often a specific team.

Immediacy is the whole design: memory of a transaction decays within days, and so does the chance to recover a bad one. Keep it under a minute, reference the interaction explicitly, and route negative answers straight into ticketing. Its counterpart, the relationship survey, measures the brand-level view between transactions.

Voice of the Customer (VoC)

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the complete picture of what customers say about a business — survey responses, complaints, reviews, support conversations and social mentions — collected and analyzed as one body of evidence for decisions.

A VoC program is defined by coverage and consequence: does it hear customers on every channel they actually use, and does what they say change anything? Unifying the streams matters because each one alone is biased — surveys hear the invited, reviews hear the extremes, support hears the blocked.

Wait-time satisfaction

Wait-time satisfaction measures how customers feel about the time they waited — in a queue, on hold, at a gate, for a delivery. Perceived wait matters as much as measured wait: uncertain, idle waiting feels far longer than an informed wait of the same length.

Manage both clocks. The operational fix is shorter actual waits; the experiential fix is information — queue position, estimated time, something to do. Ask about the wait at the moment it ends, via a kiosk at the counter or a QR code at the seat, and correlate the answers with real timestamps to see where perception and reality diverge. In airports, clinics and banks, wait time is routinely the top driver in key driver analysis.

Wayfinding

Wayfinding is how easily people navigate a physical space — the signs, maps, floor markings and staff guidance of an airport, hospital, campus or mall. Poor wayfinding surfaces in feedback as missed gates and appointments, longer perceived waits, and frustration blamed on service quality.

Customers rarely volunteer “your signage failed me”, so ask directly at high-confusion points: “How easy was it to find us?” after a first visit, a location-tagged QR survey along the route. Because each response maps to a specific place, fixes are concrete — one sign, one junction — and their effect is measurable in the next month's scores.

Win-back campaign

A win-back campaign targets customers who have churned or gone inactive with a reason to return — an apology, an offer, or proof that the problem they left over has been fixed. Feedback data tells you whom to target and what to say.

The best win-back message is specific: “you told us X, we changed it” outperforms a generic discount because it addresses the actual reason for leaving. This is only possible when exit feedback was collected and stored — one more argument for surveying customers on the way out, not just the way in.

Frequently asked questions about CX terms

What is the difference between NPS, CSAT and CES?›

What is a good NPS score?›

What is SLI (Satisfaction Level Indicator)?›

What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel feedback?›

How many customer experience metrics should a business track?›

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