Customer Messaging & Engagement Glossary

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Customer Journey

The customer journey is the full series of experiences and touchpoints a person has with a company over time, from first becoming aware of it through purchase and ongoing support. It is usually broken into stages and visualized as a journey map to reveal needs, friction, and emotions at each step.

In-App Messaging

In-app messaging is the practice of delivering targeted, contextual messages to people while they are actively using a website or application, rendered inside the product's own UI rather than as an external notification. It spans support conversations, onboarding nudges, feature announcements, and proactive engagement.

Lead Capture

Lead capture is the process of collecting a prospect's contact details (typically name, email, or phone) at the moment they show interest, so a business can follow up and move them through the sales funnel. On a website it happens through forms, pop-ups, chatbots, and live-chat conversations.

Lead Qualification

Lead qualification is the process of evaluating a prospect against fit and intent criteria to decide whether they are worth a sales team's time and how ready they are to buy. It sorts raw inquiries into stages such as marketing-qualified (MQL) and sales-qualified (SQL) so effort is concentrated on the prospects most likely to convert.

Personalization

Personalization is the practice of tailoring content, offers, and conversations to an individual based on who they are and what they are doing, rather than showing everyone the same generic experience. In messaging and support, it means using a visitor's context, such as their name, current page, location, and history, to make interactions feel relevant and human.

UTM Parameters

UTM parameters are tags appended to a URL's query string (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content) that record which marketing campaign, channel, and source sent a visitor to your site. The acronym comes from Urchin Tracking Module, the analytics software Google acquired in 2005.

Visitor Tracking

Visitor tracking is the practice of collecting context about the people browsing a website, such as the pages they view, their device and browser, where they came from, and an approximate location. In Eloqra this context is captured on a visitor's first chat message and shown to the operator answering in Telegram.