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Support and feedback loops glossary
49 terms from R22, Support and feedback loops — 23 defined in the guide itself and 26 more from the field around it. Every term the guide teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
R22 · How to measure & scale
Support and feedback loops
When something goes wrong, how fast do we hear and fix it?
Every term below is defined in the words of support and feedback loops, guide R22 of craft guides for educational technologists, and opens the guide at the slide where it is taught. 26 of the 49 are the field’s vocabulary rather than the guide’s own: words a reader will meet around this subject, defined here because the guide assumes them. 4 terms are also defined by another guide in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole craft glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| B | |||
| Blameless review | A review of an incident that looks for contributing causes without blaming a person or team (Lunney & Lueder, 2016). |
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| Bug report | A report of a software fault that gives the steps to reproduce it, what was expected, what happened, and the device and version in use. |
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| C | |||
| Canned response | A pre-written reply to a common question that support staff insert into a ticket and adapt. Also called a macro. |
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| Champion | A teacher or staff member who knows a tool well, helps colleagues with it and passes problems on. Also called a super-user. |
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| Closing the loop | Telling the person who reported a problem what happened to it, including when the answer is "not yet". R15 Making sure analytics leads to an action that reaches learners (Clow, 2012). |
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| Complaint iceberg | The pattern in which about half of people with a problem tell a front-line person and only 1–5% escalate to head office, so head office hears from the tip (Goodman, 1999). |
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| Contact rate | The number of support contacts divided by the number of active users or accounts in the same period, used to tell growth in use from growth in problems. |
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| Customer effort | How hard a person has to work to get a problem solved, including repeat contacts and channel switches (Dixon et al., 2010). |
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| Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) | The share of users who rate a support interaction as satisfactory, usually from a one-question survey sent when the ticket closes. |
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| E | |||
| Escalation | Passing a ticket to someone with more expertise (functional escalation) or more authority (hierarchical escalation) when it cannot be resolved where it is. |
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| Exit and voice | Two responses to a failing organisation: leaving it, or speaking up to change it (Hirschman, 1970). |
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| F | |||
| Failed deployment recovery time | The time it takes to recover from a deployment that fails and requires immediate intervention (DORA, 2026). R12 How long it takes to recover from a deployment that fails and needs immediate intervention (DORA, 2026). |
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| Failure demand | Demand on a service caused by a failure to do something, or to do it right, for the user (Seddon, 2003). |
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| Feature request | A user's suggestion for something the product does not yet do, logged separately from faults and passed to the product team. |
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| First response time | The time between a user raising a ticket and the first reply from a person, not counting automatic acknowledgements. |
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| First-contact resolution (FCR) | The share of requests resolved in the user's first contact, with no follow-up, transfer or repeat contact needed. |
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| H | |||
| Help and documentation heuristic | Nielsen's tenth usability heuristic: it is best if a system needs no additional explanation, but documentation may be necessary to help users complete their tasks (Nielsen, 2024). |
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| Hypercare | A fixed period of extra support straight after a launch or migration, with more staff, faster targets and daily review of issues. |
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| I | |||
| In-context help | Help shown inside the task, at the point where a user needs it, rather than in a separate help centre. |
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| Incident | An unplanned interruption to a service or reduction in its quality (AXELOS, 2019). |
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| ITIL | The most widely used framework for IT service management, which separates restoring normal service after an incident from finding and removing the causes of incidents (AXELOS, 2019). |
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| K | |||
| Knowledge base | A searchable collection of articles on how to use a product and how to fix known problems, used by support staff, by users, or by both. |
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| Knowledge-Centered Service | A support method with two loops: the Solve Loop, the request-response workflow, and the Evolve Loop, which analyses patterns across many requests to improve products, processes and policies (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2016). |
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| Known error | A problem whose cause has been analysed but not yet removed, usually with a workaround in place (AXELOS, 2019). |
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| M | |||
| Major incident | An incident with serious impact on many users, handled by a separate procedure with a named lead, a dedicated team and frequent updates. |
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| P | |||
| Postmortem | A written record of an incident, its impact, the actions taken, its causes and the follow-up to prevent it recurring (Lunney & Lueder, 2016). |
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| Problem | A cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents (AXELOS, 2019). |
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| R | |||
| Recurrence | How often a problem that was thought fixed comes back. |
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| Reopen rate | The share of closed tickets that users open again because the answer did not solve their problem. |
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| Root cause analysis | A structured investigation that traces a fault back to the underlying conditions that produced it, so that the fix prevents it from returning. |
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| S | |||
| Self-service | Support that users get for themselves, through help articles, guided fixes or account tools, without contacting a person. |
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| Service catalogue | The published list of services a provider offers, with what each includes, who may ask for it and how. |
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| Service desk | The single point of contact between a service provider and its users, which receives incidents and requests and sees them through to resolution. |
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| Service level | A target for how quickly a type of request will be answered or resolved. | ||
| Service level agreement (SLA) | A documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that states the services to be provided and the levels of service expected, such as response and resolution times. |
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| Service recovery | What an organisation does to put things right after it has failed a user: acknowledging the failure, fixing it, and making up for the trouble caused. |
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| Service request | A user's request for something that is a normal part of the service, such as a password reset or a new account, as distinct from a report of a fault. |
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| Severity level | A grade given to a fault according to how many users it affects and how badly, which sets how fast it must be handled. |
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| Silent failure | A fault that users meet and work around without reporting it. |
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| Status page | A public page showing whether each part of a service is working, with updates on current incidents and planned maintenance. |
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| Survey fatigue | Falling willingness to respond as people receive more surveys (Porter et al., 2004). |
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| T | |||
| Tag | A label on a ticket that records its underlying cause, so tickets can be counted by cause. |
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| Ticket | The record of one request or report in a support system, holding who raised it, what was said and done, and its current status. |
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| Ticket deflection | The share of would-be support contacts that are resolved by self-service before a ticket is raised. |
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| Tiered support | An arrangement in which first-line staff handle common queries, and pass harder ones to second-line specialists and then to third-line engineers or the vendor. |
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| Time to restore | The time from a fault being reported to the user being able to work again. |
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| Triage | Sorting a new report by severity and type, and deciding who handles it and how fast. |
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| V | |||
| Voice of the customer (VoC) | A programme that gathers what users say across support tickets, surveys, interviews and reviews, and reports it to the people who decide what to build. |
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| W | |||
| Workaround | A way of reducing or avoiding the effect of a fault that lets the user carry on before the cause has been fixed. |
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