Live chat

Latency is the delay between a customer’s message and the first useful response. In live chat and voice it directly shapes perceived quality, and it is one of the few AI quality measures a customer notices immediately, well before judging whether the answer was correct.

Bot handoff is the transfer of a live conversation from an automated agent to a human, ideally with the full transcript and any collected context attached. A clean handoff prevents the customer from repeating information, which is the most common complaint recorded about automated support experiences.

Omnichannel describes one continuous conversation and history across chat, email, voice, and social, so a customer who switches channel does not have to restart. The distinction from multichannel is continuity: offering many channels is not omnichannel unless context follows the customer between them.

A queue is the ordered set of contacts waiting to be handled, usually segmented by channel, language, skill, or customer tier. Queue design determines who waits and for how long, making it one of the most consequential and least visible decisions in a support operation.