Live Chat & Customer Support Glossary

Agent Occupancy

Agent occupancy is the percentage of a support agent's logged-in, available time that is actually spent handling customer interactions, including active conversation time and after-contact work. It measures how busy agents are while on the clock and ready to take work.

AI Agent

An AI agent is an autonomous software system that uses a large language model to understand a customer request, reason about it, take actions through connected tools, and resolve the issue end to end with minimal human input. In support, it goes beyond answering questions to actually completing tasks and handing off to a person when needed.

AI Coding Agent

An AI coding agent is a software tool that pairs a large language model with access to real developer tools (file editing, a terminal, test runners) so it can plan a multi-step task, write and run code, observe the result, and iterate toward a goal with limited human supervision. It differs from plain autocomplete by acting in a loop rather than suggesting one line at a time.

Asynchronous Messaging

Asynchronous messaging is a style of customer conversation that can start, pause, and resume at the participants' convenience, kept in a single continuous thread rather than a real-time session that ends when either party leaves. Customers send a message and pick up the reply later, without staying glued to the chat window.

Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or context, so that messaging and support can be tailored to each group instead of treating everyone the same.

Autoresponder

An autoresponder is a rule that automatically sends a predefined message the moment a customer triggers it, such as starting a chat or messaging outside business hours. In support, it acknowledges receipt of an inquiry and sets expectations before a human operator replies.

Average Response Time

Average Response Time (ART) is a support metric measuring the mean time customers wait for an agent reply across all messages in a period, not just the first one. It is calculated as total wait time divided by the number of replies sent.

Bot-to-Human Handoff

Bot-to-human handoff is the moment a chatbot or AI agent transfers an active conversation to a live human operator, passing along the context it has gathered. It exists so automation can resolve routine questions while a person steps in for issues the bot cannot, or should not, handle alone.

Business Hours

Business hours are the configured windows of days and times during which a support team is staffed and expected to answer live conversations. They let a chat tool switch between a live, real-time experience and an after-hours fallback so customers always know whether someone is available.

Business Messaging

Business messaging is the practice of companies communicating with customers through conversational messaging channels (website chat, in-app threads, SMS, and apps like WhatsApp or Messenger) instead of phone calls, email, or formal request forms. The interaction is treated as a persistent, two-way conversation rather than a one-off session, so context and history carry forward over time.

Canned Response

A canned response is a pre-written, reusable reply that a support agent selects and sends to answer a common customer question quickly and consistently [3]. Different vendors call the same idea a saved reply, a macro, or a template, and some versions also trigger actions like tagging or closing a conversation [1][4].

Chat Abandonment Rate

Chat abandonment rate is the percentage of live-chat conversations that visitors start but leave before connecting with an agent or reaching a resolution. It is a support-quality metric that surfaces friction caused by long waits, confusing UX, or being ignored.

Chat Concurrency

Chat concurrency is the number of separate live-chat conversations a single support operator handles at the same time. It is both a real-time workload measure and a capacity-planning metric that trades agent efficiency against response quality.

Chat Launcher

A chat launcher is the small floating button — usually a speech-bubble icon pinned to a bottom corner of the page — that a visitor clicks to open a live-chat window. It is the persistent, always-visible entry point to the chat experience.

Chat Message

A chat message is a single text exchange inside a live-chat conversation, sent by either a website visitor or a support operator. In Eloqra each message is stored with a direction (In or Out) and an author (Visitor or Operator), and belongs to one Open or Closed conversation.

Chat Routing

Chat routing is the logic a live-chat or support platform uses to direct each incoming conversation to the right operator, team, or queue. It applies rules based on agent availability, capacity, skills, and customer attributes so that visitors reach a qualified responder quickly.

Chat Transcript

A chat transcript is the complete, timestamped written record of a live-chat conversation between a website visitor and a support operator or chatbot. It captures every message in sequence, usually alongside metadata about the session, and can be archived, exported, or emailed for later reference.

Chatbot

A chatbot is a software application that simulates a human-like conversation through text or speech, used to answer questions and complete tasks automatically. In customer support it ranges from simple rule-based scripts to AI-driven assistants that interpret natural language and resolve requests without a human agent.

Co-Browsing

Co-browsing (collaborative browsing) is a support technique that lets an agent view and interact with a customer's web page in real time, scrolling, highlighting, or filling fields alongside them. It mirrors only the browser content, not the whole device, so the visitor stays in control of the session.

Contact

A contact is the stored record of an individual person a business has interacted with - typically holding identity details like name and email plus the history of conversations and activity tied to them. In live chat and support tools, a contact is created or enriched the moment a visitor starts talking, turning an anonymous browser into a known, addressable person.

Contact Rate

Contact rate is the share of a business activity that generates an inbound support contact, calculated by dividing total support contacts by a base unit such as orders, active users, or shipments. It measures how often using a product forces a customer to reach out for help.

Conversation

A conversation is the threaded exchange of messages between a single website visitor and a project's operators, grouped as one unit with a status and unread counters. In Eloqra it is the container that holds every message, the visitor's captured context, and the assigned operator.

Conversation Assignment

Conversation assignment is the act of attaching an incoming chat to the specific operator who is responsible for answering it. In Eloqra, assignment is implicit "first responder": the first operator who replies to a conversation is recorded as its assigned agent.

Conversation Tag

A conversation tag is a short label attached to a support conversation (or an individual message within it) that classifies its topic, intent, or status so the team can search, filter, route, and report on it later.

Conversational AI

Conversational AI is a class of artificial intelligence that uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand, interpret, and respond to human language in a free-form, human-like dialogue. In customer messaging it powers chatbots and virtual agents that hold real conversations instead of following a fixed script.

Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce is the practice of buying, selling, and supporting customers through real-time conversation in messaging channels, live chat, and voice or AI assistants, so shoppers can ask questions and complete purchases inside a chat thread. It sits at the intersection of e-commerce and messaging, turning a back-and-forth dialogue into a path to purchase.

Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is a customer-centric approach that uses real-time, personalized dialogue, typically through live chat, chatbots, and messaging, to engage and qualify website visitors instead of relying on static forms and delayed follow-up. It treats chat as a revenue tool for sales and marketing rather than a pure support utility.

Conversational Support

Conversational support is a customer-service model where help happens as an ongoing, natural-language dialogue between a customer and a business rather than a series of disconnected, ticket-style exchanges. The conversation and its context persist across channels and over time, so each reply builds on what came before.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a single-question survey metric that measures how much effort a customer had to expend to get an issue resolved, a question answered, or a task completed. The premise is that lower-effort interactions drive higher loyalty and retention.

Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is the ongoing, two-way interaction between a business and its customers across communication channels, measuring how invested people are in a brand rather than treating each touchpoint as a one-off transaction.