Glossary
The language of customer intelligence, defined plainly.
Compass uses a small, precise vocabulary. Here is what each term means and why it matters when you are building profiles, audiences, and campaigns.
- Audience
- A set of customers that match a query. In Compass an audience is generated from a plain-English description and validated against real profiles before you use it.
- Attribute
- A field on a customer profile. Attributes can be declared (from a survey), computed (a customer fact), or added by a connected application without a database redesign.
- Customer fact
- A derived truth about a person — lifetime value, order count, days since last purchase — computed from underlying data rather than typed in by hand, and kept current as new data arrives.
- Customer profile
- One record built around a person, not an application: identity, commerce, engagement, consent, and ecosystem activity in a single timeline.
- Event
- A recorded action a customer took — a purchase, a survey response, an email open — sent into Compass and attached to their profile.
- Identity resolution
- The process of matching identifiers scattered across systems to a single customer, so one person is one record instead of a scatter of half-matching rows.
- Journey
- An automated sequence that responds to customer behavior, re-evaluating conditions before every send so no one stays trapped in a flow.
- Provider
- An external source of data or identity — Shopify, a survey tool, an API integration — that contributes to a customer profile while keeping its origin labeled.
- Schema
- The definition of the data an event or attribute carries. The schema registry keeps these consistent so incoming data stays queryable.
- Sender domain
- The authenticated domain a customer sees messages come from. Compass sends from an identity you control to protect deliverability and trust.
- Suppression
- A rule that prevents a customer from receiving messages — because they unsubscribed, bounced, or should otherwise be excluded. Suppression travels with the customer.
- Tenant
- An isolated workspace for one business. Data, identities, and configuration are separated per tenant so no activity leaks between customers.
- Trigger
- The condition that starts a journey or action — an event, a change in a customer fact, or a moment in time — evaluated against live profile data.
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