Glossary

The service drive is the covered lane where customers hand their vehicles over at a dealership, and the point in the aftersales process where an advisor greets the car, writes the repair order and agrees what will be looked at. Everything the workshop earns that day is decided there.

The service lane is the covered drive-in area of a dealership where customers arrive for service, meet the advisor and have the vehicle walked around, checked in and written up before it goes to the workshop. The name is also used for the software that runs that check-in process.

A service loaner is a vehicle a dealership lends a customer at no charge while their own car is in the workshop, drawn from a fleet the dealership owns or leases for that purpose. It is a capacity asset carrying a daily cost, not a courtesy gesture.

A service menu is the fixed list of maintenance jobs a dealership sells, with each job defined in advance by its operation content, labour time and price. It lets the advisor present a set choice at the write-up instead of building a quote from scratch on every car.

Service recovery is what an organisation does after it has failed a customer: acknowledging the failure quickly, fixing it, compensating in proportion where that is warranted, and changing the process that caused it. It is a defined operational practice, not an apology.

A service reminder is a scheduled message prompting a vehicle owner to book work that is due: a routine service, an annual test, an outstanding recall, or a repair they turned down at an earlier visit. It is the main tool a workshop has for filling its own diary rather than waiting for the phone.

A service report is the record a technician produces at the end of a visit, covering what was found, what was done, which parts and labour were used, and the condition the asset was left in. It is written for the customer and for the file somebody reads months later.

Service retention is the share of a dealership's customers who come back to that dealership for service inside a defined window, usually measured against vehicles it sold. It is the metric most sensitive to definition, because the window and the denominator can move the same store's result by twenty points.

A severity rating is a scored judgement of how serious a defect is, placed on a defined scale so the same fault, recorded by different people on different days, lands in the same band and triggers the same response. It ranks consequence, not likelihood.

A shallowfake is a real photo, video or document that has been altered with ordinary editing tools such as a phone photo app, Photoshop or a free web editor. No AI is involved: the original file is genuine, and something in it has been added, removed or swapped.

A shared inbox is a team workspace where incoming work arrives in one queue and each item can be assigned an owner, given a status and tracked to completion, rather than sitting in an individual's personal mailbox. The queue, not the person, holds the work.

A shop foreman is the senior technician who runs the workshop floor: the person junior technicians call when a diagnosis stalls, who checks quality before a car leaves, and who decides whether a job needs to move to someone else. It is a technical leadership role, not a departmental management one.

Showroom traffic is the count of customer visits to a dealership sales floor in a given period, and the base number most sales metrics are divided by. Managers use it to work out closing ratio, plan staffing per shift, and separate a traffic problem from a selling problem.

A sight unseen sale is a vehicle sale agreed without the buyer physically inspecting the car first. The deal is done from photographs, video, a written description and a condition report, with delivery or collection happening only after the paperwork is signed.

A site acceptance test (SAT) is the formal test of a machine, line or system after delivery and installation at the buyer's site, run against an agreed protocol to confirm it performs as specified in its real environment. Passing the SAT usually triggers final payment, the start of the warranty and the handover of responsibility to the buyer.

A site survey is a structured check of a physical location carried out before work is scheduled, recording access, dimensions, existing services, conditions and hazards so that the job can be quoted, resourced and planned accurately. It answers what is actually there, before anyone commits to a date.

An SIU, or Special Investigation Unit, is the team inside an insurer that investigates claims and applications suspected of fraud. Handlers refer a file when indicators appear, and the unit gathers evidence so a decision can be made on facts rather than suspicion.

A service level agreement is a contractual commitment defining the service a provider will deliver, how performance is measured, and what the customer receives when a commitment is missed. In field service an SLA usually fixes a response time, a resolution time, a coverage window and a remedy.

A snagging app is software used to record defects on a new-build or newly fitted property, one item at a time, each with a photo, a location, a description and a status, so the builder can put every item right and the buyer can see it closed. In the US it is called a punch list app.

A snagging inspection is the systematic check of a newly built or newly refurbished property for defects, unfinished work and departures from specification, carried out before or shortly after handover so the builder can put them right. The output is the snagging list; the inspection is the process that produces it.

A snagging list is the itemised record of defects, unfinished items and departures from specification found when near-complete construction or installation work is inspected, written up so each item can be put right and signed off. In the US and Canada the same document is called a punch list.

Sold hours are the labour hours a workshop invoices, whether to a retail customer, a manufacturer under warranty or an internal department. They are the book or menu time for the job, not the time the technician actually took, and they are the numerator in most workshop performance ratios.

A sold order is a vehicle a dealership has sold to a named customer but has not yet delivered, because it is still being built, still in transit, or still waiting on preparation. It is a committed unit and a live customer relationship, sitting in the gap between the signature and the keys.

Spare parts identification is the process of determining exactly which replacement part fits one specific unit, using the serial number, the build variant and the manufacturer's parts catalogue. It replaces guesswork from a description of what the broken part looks like. Get it wrong and you ship twice.

A spot check is an unannounced inspection of a small number of items drawn from a larger population, used to test whether the routine process is working. It is triggered by suspicion or by a sampling plan rather than by an event or a date in the calendar.

An SRP, or search results page, is the filtered inventory listing a shopper sees before choosing a car, showing many vehicles as tiles with a thumbnail, price and headline spec. It is the page that decides which of your units gets looked at properly.

A staged accident is a collision deliberately arranged by the people taking part so that an insurance claim can be made, with every vehicle and occupant under the fraudsters' control. That last point separates it from an induced accident, where a genuine innocent motorist is manoeuvred into the crash.

Status tracking is the practice of recording which stage each item of work has reached in a defined sequence, and displaying it so the state of the queue, and of any single case within it, can be read directly rather than reconstructed by asking people.

A statutory inspection is an inspection or examination of equipment that UK law requires, at a set interval or trigger, by a competent person, with a written record. The main regulations are LOLER for lifting equipment, PUWER for work equipment, PSSR for pressure systems and the Electricity at Work Regulations for electrical systems.

A stock condition survey is a structured visual inspection of a social landlord's homes that records the condition and remaining life of each building component, checks compliance with the Decent Homes Standard and hazard ratings, and feeds the long-term investment plan. Most landlords aim to survey every home within a five-year cycle.

Straight through processing, or STP, is the handling of a claim from notification to payment entirely by automated rules, with no manual intervention by a handler. A claim either qualifies at intake and flows through, or it falls out into a manual queue for a person to work.

Speech to text (STT) is the automated conversion of spoken audio into written words, producing a machine-readable transcript that can be searched, quoted, and stored next to the recording it came from. Accuracy is reported as word error rate.

A subdomain is a domain name that sits one level below a parent domain, created by adding a label to the left of it, so support.example.com is a subdomain of example.com. To DNS it is simply a longer name, resolved the same way as any other.

Subrogation is the right of an insurer that has paid a claim to step into the policyholder's legal position and recover that payment from whoever caused the loss. The insured's rights against the responsible party transfer to the insurer, up to the amount it paid out.

Support triage is the practice of assessing every contact arriving at a support desk and deciding, before any work begins, how urgent it is, how much it affects, and which skill it needs. The output of triage is a priority and an owner, never a solution.

Synthetic media is content generated or substantially altered by artificial intelligence rather than recorded from the real world: images, video, audio and documents with no genuine original behind them. In claims, it is the umbrella term that deepfakes and AI-generated damage photos sit inside.

Tamper evident describes a control that makes alteration of a record or a container detectable after the fact rather than impossible, so anyone who checks can tell whether something changed, even though nothing physically stopped the change from being made.

Technician efficiency is the labour hours a technician sells divided by the hours that technician actually clocks onto jobs, shown as a percentage, and it measures one thing only: how fast the work gets done against the published flat-rate time. It routinely runs above 100%, and it should.

Technician levels are the graded ladder a workshop uses to classify its technicians by proven skill, from apprentice through to master technician, with the grade deciding which jobs a technician is allocated and what they are paid. The frameworks behind the grades differ by country.

Technician utilisation is the share of a technician's available paid hours that are booked to customer work, calculated as billable or job hours divided by total available hours. It measures how full the diary is, not how much of that booked time was actually spent working on the asset.

A tenancy deposit is money a tenant pays a landlord or letting agent at the start of a tenancy as security against unpaid rent, damage or cleaning costs. In England and Wales it must be held in a government-approved protection scheme and returned in full at the end unless the landlord can evidence a deduction.

A tenant inspection app is a tool that lets the tenant, rather than an agent or inventory clerk, record the condition of a property on their own phone at check-in, mid-tenancy or check-out. The landlord or agent sets what has to be photographed, and the tenant's submission becomes the dated condition record.

A test drive is a supervised or unsupervised drive of a vehicle by a prospective buyer before purchase, run by a dealership under its motor trade insurance and after a licence check. It is also called a demo or a demonstration drive, and it is the single strongest predictor of a sale on the floor.

A thermographic inspection uses an infrared camera to map the thermal radiation leaving a surface, so that a condition beneath or behind that surface can be inferred from the pattern. It measures surface temperature. It does not see through anything.

A third party claim is a claim brought by someone outside the policy against the insurer of the person who caused their loss, so claimant and paying insurer have no contract. Liability has to be established before the value of the loss is settled.

A third party lead is a sales enquiry a dealership buys from an independent marketplace or lead aggregator, where the shopper submitted their details on someone else's website. The dealer pays per lead or by monthly subscription, and the same enquiry is often sold to competing dealers as well.

A thorough examination is the systematic and detailed examination of lifting equipment by a competent person, required under Regulation 9 of the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998. It produces a written report, not a certificate, and is distinct from both routine inspection and servicing.

What a video thumbnail is, why it decides whether your video gets played, and how to pick a frame that earns the click in emails and messages.

Ticket deflection is the practice of answering a customer's question through self-service so that no support ticket is created, together with the metric that counts how often that happens. The metric is measured as an absence, which is what makes it so easy to report and so easy to fake.

A timestamp is a recorded value stating when a particular system observed a particular event, and its evidential weight depends entirely on which clock set it: a device clock the participant controls, a server clock the receiving organisation controls, or an independent third-party clock.

A timestamped photo is a photograph that carries a record of when it was taken, either printed on the image, stored in its metadata, or logged by the system that received it. As evidence, its value depends on which clock set the time and whether the file has changed since.

A total loss is a claim that an insurer settles by paying out the pre-loss value of the damaged item instead of paying for it to be repaired. The test is economic rather than mechanical: most written-off vehicles could physically be rebuilt, the cost has simply passed the point where rebuilding makes sense.

A touchless claim is a claim settled without a human visiting the loss. In the stricter sense used by insurers, it is a claim handled from notification to payment without a handler touching it at all, with the policyholder's own submitted evidence and automated rules doing the work a person used to do.

A third party administrator, or TPA, is a company that handles claims and related administration on behalf of an organisation that carries the risk, such as an insurer, a self-insured employer or a scheme. A TPA is paid a fee to administer, and never carries the risk itself.

A trade-in appraisal is the value a dealership puts on a customer's vehicle when that vehicle is offered as part payment against another car, built from a condition assessment plus current market data. It is vehicle appraisal applied to one specific moment: a car being used to buy a car.

Transcription is the conversion of recorded speech into written text, stored alongside the recording so the spoken part of a submission can be read, searched and quoted instead of replayed in full. It is also called speech to text, or ASR.

A truck roll is a single dispatch of a technician and a service vehicle to a customer site to diagnose, repair or install something. Field service teams count truck rolls as a unit of cost, because every trip spends fuel, drive time and a slot on the schedule.

An underbody inspection is a structured examination of the underside of a vehicle or machine, covering chassis, suspension, brake and fuel lines, exhaust, driveline and corrosion, carried out from an inspection pit, on a vehicle lift, or with the asset raised and supported on stands.

Unit sales is the count of vehicles a dealership delivers in a period, measured in vehicles rather than revenue. It is the volume half of dealership profit, multiplied by gross profit per unit to give total gross, and it is counted differently depending on what is included.

Upload versus capture is the distinction between two ways visual material reaches an organisation: an upload lets the sender choose an existing file from their device, while a live capture records inside the requested session itself and closes most of the window between recording and submission.

Upsell rate is the percentage of recommended additional work that a service department gets approved by the customer, measured either as approved items against every item recommended, or as the share of repair orders carrying at least one extra. The two methods give different answers from the same month.

A used car inspection is a structured condition check of a used vehicle against a defined checklist, recording identity, mileage, mechanical condition, safety items, bodywork and interior. It establishes what state a car is in, without saying anything about what it is worth.

Van stock is the set of parts and consumables an engineer carries in the service vehicle. Also called truck stock, trunk stock or boot stock, it is the only inventory that exists at the moment a job is being worked, which makes it the stock level that decides whether the job closes.

A vehicle condition report, usually shortened to VCR, is a structured record of a vehicle's physical and mechanical state at one point in time: panel by panel, with photographs, declared damage and often a numeric grade. It is the document every sight-unseen vehicle transaction is priced against.

A VDP, or vehicle detail page, is the page dedicated to one specific vehicle in stock, carrying its photos, video, price, specification, history and enquiry options. It is the page where a shopper stops browsing the lot and starts considering a single car.

A vehicle appraisal is a formal assessment of what a vehicle is worth at a given moment, based on its identity, specification, mileage, condition and the live market for that exact unit. It is the general act of valuing a car, whatever the reason the valuation is needed.

Vehicle delivery is the event at which a sold vehicle physically passes to its buyer: the day the car is signed for and the keys change hands. It is the point where a sold order becomes a delivered unit, and it is not the same thing as the handover that happens inside it.

A vehicle history report is a VIN-keyed summary of what has been officially recorded about one specific vehicle: title brands, reported odometer readings, ownership changes, and logged incidents. It shows what was reported to a database, which is not the same as everything that happened to the car.

Vehicle merchandising is how a dealership presents a specific unit online: the photo set, the written description, the video, the price and the specification on its listing. It is the digital equivalent of how a car used to be prepped and positioned on the front line.

A vehicle walkaround is a filmed or in-person circuit of a car in which every panel, tyre, interior surface and warning light is shown and described in a fixed order, so the person who cannot stand next to the vehicle can still see its condition. Dealerships use it in sales presentations and in service documentation.

Vertical video is video shot and shown in a portrait frame, taller than it is wide, most commonly at a 9:16 aspect ratio, the shape a phone produces when it is held upright. It fills the whole screen of a phone held the same way, with no black bars.

VHC stands for Vehicle Health Check: the inspection a workshop does during a service, reported as red, amber or green. What is checked and why it matters.

Video analytics is the measurement layer around a video: who opened it, how far they watched, what they clicked, and what happened next. In a dealership it covers both published marketing video and the one-to-one videos reps and advisors send to individual customers.

A video call to action is the specific next step a viewer is asked to take after watching, presented as a clickable button on the page around the video rather than a line the presenter says on camera. At a dealership the actions that matter are book, approve, pay and reply.

Video captions are timed text shown on top of a video and synchronised to the audio, carrying the spoken words plus any meaningful non speech sound. They let a viewer follow the content with the sound off, or with no hearing at all.

Video claims are insurance claims in which the damage is assessed from video recorded by the policyholder or a third party on their own phone, either during a live call with the handler or asynchronously through a guided link, instead of from a site visit. The video, its narration and its metadata become the primary evidence in the file.

Video coaching is the management practice of reviewing the videos reps actually send to customers and giving specific, repeatable feedback on them. It treats a sent video the way a call centre treats a recorded call: as a real artefact of the work, not a training exercise.

A video codec compresses and decompresses video. H.264, H.265 and AV1 explained, and why the codec decides the quality and file size of your videos.

Video compression is the process of making a video file smaller by discarding the data a viewer is least likely to miss, so it can be stored cheaply and sent over a network at a practical size. Almost every video you record, send or watch has been compressed.

Video content for business: the formats that work for sales and service teams, from walkarounds to explainers, and how to plan them.

Video email explained: how to send video in email that actually plays, why attachments fail, and how a thumbnail plus link gets more clicks.

Video engagement explained: how views, watch time and clicks show who is interested, and how sales teams use those signals to time their follow-up.

A video form builder is a tool for assembling structured workflows in which an answer can be a short video recording as well as typed data. The person filling it in works through the steps on their phone, and the completed submission comes back as one merged video with a structured report beside it.

Video hosting explained: where your videos live, how a hosted page differs from an attachment, and what to look for in a business video host.

Video inspection is the practice of judging the condition of an object, vehicle, property or space by recording it on video and reviewing that footage, either live as it is captured or afterwards. The term covers two unrelated fields: camera surveys of pipes and ducts, and phone based inspection of assets.

A video landing page is a single web page built around one video, branded to the sender and carrying the actions the viewer is meant to take next, such as booking, approving, paying or replying. The video is the page, rather than one element inside a longer one.

A video library is the central, searchable store of the videos a team has recorded and sent, held with who sent each one, to whom, when, and what the customer did afterwards. It works as an archive, a coaching source, and a record when a customer disputes what they were told.

Personalized video messaging explained: recording a short video for one specific customer and sharing it as a branded page. Why it outperforms email.

Video personalisation is the practice of making a video specific to one named recipient, so that what they receive could not have been sent to anybody else. The term stretches across a lot of ground, from a stock clip with a name merged onto it to a video filmed on the spot for one customer.

What a video player is, which features matter for customer videos (speed, captions, tracking) and why a branded player beats an attachment.

Video production for business messages: planning, recording and sharing customer videos on a phone, without a studio or an editor.

Video prospecting is the use of short, individually recorded videos in cold outreach: a rep records a video for someone who has not enquired and sends it to start a conversation. It changes the format of a cold approach, not the quality of the list behind it.

A video quality score is a number given to a sent video by rating it against a written list of criteria, so videos can be compared across a team and tracked over time. Often shortened to VQS. It is only as good as the criteria behind it, and bad criteria push a team toward worse videos.

A video quote is a quotation for repair or maintenance work delivered to the customer as a short video, in which the technician or advisor shows the worn part or the fault on the customer's own vehicle, states the price, and gives the customer a way to approve the work from the same message.

A video reply is a short video recorded in answer to a specific customer question and sent back through the channel they used. Instead of typing an answer about condition, a comparison or a price, the rep records thirty seconds saying it and showing the thing in question.

Video resolution explained: 720p, 1080p and 4K compared, and which resolution to use for customer video messages on mobile networks.

Video response rate is the percentage of sent videos that produce a customer action, calculated as videos that got a reply, click, booking or approval divided by videos sent. It measures whether the video moved the customer, not whether they watched it.