Glossary of Terms

Deepen your understanding to drive your expertise, and share with colleagues to enlighten ideas and inspire innovation. This glossary of terms will help to elevate clarity, and guide conversations that bridge gaps across teams of shared interest in customer centricity.

What is an Interaction?

An interaction refers to a touchpoint within a journey, or the way customer service interactions are structured and the resulting reaction by customers. Unlike customer experience (CX), which is a consumer’s perception of a brand based on a collection of touchpoints, an interaction experience is about what a customer thinks about a single interaction with an important touchpoint in the customer journey – the contact center.

Many things can impact a contact center interaction experience. Breaking down a phone interaction, the interactive voice response (IVR) system sets the tone for the transaction. Everything from the recorded greeting to the menu structure begins to influence customer perceptions. Next, the length of time a customer has to wait in queue before talking to an agent is factored into an interaction experience. Finally, the quality of the agent is probably the most important element of an interaction experience. For a satisfying experience, the agent must have the right skill set to help the customer, resolve most issues on the first contact, avoid putting customers on hold or transferring them, and be able to build rapport.

There are many components involved in delivering satisfying interaction experiences. People, processes, and technology must be aligned on the common goal of making every individual interaction personalized, consistent, and free of friction. As businesses try to optimize every touchpoint along the customer journey, assessing and refining every part of contact center interaction experiences is a key to success.

This optimization begins with collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Contact centers often invite customers to complete surveys that measure customer satisfaction (CSAT) and transactional Net Promoter Scores (tNPS). Survey results can be supplemented with insights from text and speech analytics tools, which can comb through all contacts from all channels and identify trending topics, contact drivers, customer sentiment, and more. The insights from this feedback can help organizations ensure every interaction is satisfying and meets customer expectations.

About NICE Satmetrix

NICE Satmetrix is the leading global provider of Voice of the Customer (VOC) software used by the world's most forward-thinking companies to analyze and transform their customer service interactions. Our Customer Journey-based solution combines and analyzes customer interactions, solicited feedback, and operational data at enterprise scale to uncover blind spots, increase customer satisfaction and improve agent performance.

With consumers reaching out to contact centers for more reasons than ever before, providing consistent and optimized experiences is central to fostering loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value. NICE Satmetrix VOC enables businesses of all sizes to grow the value of customer service touchpoints and operationalize customer feedback.

With NICE Satmetrix VOC, the top VOC solution for contact centers, contact centers get access to:

Integrations with NICE inContact CXone and the NICE portfolio of contact center solutions

  • Superior analytics
  • Digital omnichannel and hassle-free IVR integrations
  • Customer Journey-based design
  • One-stop-shop for all your contact center VOC needs

NICE Satmetrix is the co-creator of the Net Promoter Score® (NPS®), one of the best indicators of customer loyalty and predictors of business growth. We've instilled our deep knowledge of consumer behavior into our VOC software to make NICE Satmetrix holistic VOC a true one-stop shop for Voice of the Customer with a self-service solution that meets the needs of organizations of every size.

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