Omnichannel

A unified inbox is one workspace where conversations from every channel land, so agents work a single prioritised list instead of switching between tools. It reduces context-switching cost and makes cross-channel history visible at the moment an agent is drafting a reply.

Live chat is real-time text support delivered in-product or on-site, fronted by a human agent, an AI agent, or both in sequence. Its defining constraint is synchrony: the customer is waiting, so response latency and handoff quality matter more than in asynchronous channels.

A contact centre is the team and tooling that handle inbound customer contacts across every channel, including voice, chat, email, and social. The term replaced call centre as support expanded beyond telephony, and it covers workforce management, quality assurance, and routing as well as the agents themselves.

A ticket is the record of a single customer issue and everything done about it, including messages, internal notes, actions taken, and final disposition. The ticket is the unit most support reporting counts, which is why inconsistent ticket creation quietly distorts every downstream volume metric.