The CRM & Outreach Glossary

An access hash is a 64-bit integer that Telegram's MTProto API returns next to every user, chat, and channel ID, and that your client must send back to prove it is allowed to reference that peer. Access hashes are issued per account, so a hash resolved by one Telegram account is meaningless to every other account.

Account warm-up is the practice of raising a new sending account's activity gradually over two to four weeks, and building genuine two-way conversations while you do it, so the platform sees a ramp with replies instead of a sudden burst of messages to strangers.

An autonomous software system that pursues a goal across multiple steps by perceiving, planning, acting and observing, usually with tool access.

An API scope is a named permission attached to a credential that limits which endpoints it may call, so a leaked or misused key can only do the subset of things it was minted for.

A bearer token is a credential that grants access to whoever presents it, sent as an Authorization header of the form "Bearer <token>" per RFC 6750, with no proof required that the sender is the party the token was issued to.

In email, bounce rate is the share of attempted sends that the receiving server refused, split into hard bounces, which are permanent 5xx failures such as a mailbox that does not exist, and soft bounces, which are temporary 4xx failures such as a full mailbox or a greylisting deferral.

A business connection is the link a Telegram Business account creates when it authorises a bot to read and answer its private chats, identified by a business_connection_id that the bot passes on every call it makes on that account's behalf. It is Telegram's official, revocable alternative to running automation on a personal account with a session string.

The 24-hour customer service window is the period, counted from the customer's most recent inbound WhatsApp message, during which a business may reply with free-form content instead of an approved template. Once it closes, the only thing the business may send is a message template.

Churn rate is the share of customers, or of recurring revenue, lost during a period, always calculated against the base that existed at the start of that period rather than the base at the end.

The practice of starting a conversation with prospects who have no prior relationship with you, typically via DM, email or social.

Contact enrichment is the process of attaching additional attributes (job title, company size, location, timezone, social handles, phone) to a contact record you already hold, using sources other than what that contact typed into your form.

Conversation-based pricing is the WhatsApp Business Platform billing model in which a 24-hour message thread, categorised as marketing, utility, authentication or service, is the billed unit rather than the individual message. Meta has been shifting this model toward per-message pricing for templates, with rates that vary by the recipient's country.

The stage-by-stage journey a prospect takes from first contact to paying customer, used to measure where leads drop off.

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is the percentage of survey responses that land in the satisfied band, normally the top two points of a five-point scale, measured against one specific interaction rather than the relationship as a whole.

Cursor pagination walks a result set by passing back an opaque pointer to the last row you received, instead of a numeric offset, so rows inserted or deleted while you are paging cannot shift the window and make you skip or repeat records.

Deduplication is the process of finding records that describe the same person or company across a CRM and collapsing them into one, using normalisation, candidate blocking, weighted match scoring and field-level survivorship rules.

Deliverability is the share of your sent email that actually reaches the recipient inbox rather than the spam folder or a silent discard, and it is governed mostly by sender reputation and authentication, not by the wording of the message.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail, RFC 6376) is an email authentication standard in which the sending server signs chosen headers and the message body with a private key, and the receiving server verifies that signature against a public key published in DNS at selector._domainkey.yourdomain.com.

DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, RFC 7489) is a DNS policy record published at _dmarc.yourdomain.com that tells receiving servers what to do with mail claiming to be from your domain when neither SPF nor DKIM passes in alignment with the visible From address, and where to send reports about it.

Domain warm-up is the practice of raising the daily volume on a new sending domain or IP address gradually over several weeks, sending first to the most engaged recipients, so that mailbox providers build a positive reputation for it before it ever sends at full volume.

Double opt-in is a subscription flow in which a person who submits an email address is only added to the mailing list after clicking a confirmation link sent to that address, which proves the address is real, reachable, and owned by the person who entered it.

A series of pre-written messages delivered automatically on a schedule or in response to triggers, used to nurture leads over time.

Engagement rate is the share of an audience that interacted with a piece of content, expressed as interactions divided by a chosen denominator (followers, reach or impressions), which means the same post can honestly report several very different engagement rates depending on which definition you pick.

Exponential backoff is a retry strategy in which the wait before each attempt is multiplied by a constant factor, so a client that keeps failing puts exponentially less pressure on the service it is failing against.

First response time is the elapsed time between a customer's first unanswered inbound message and the first substantive human reply to it, reported as a median and a 90th percentile rather than a mean.

A Telegram MTProto rate-limit response telling the client to back off for N seconds before retrying a request.

A forum topic is a named thread inside a Telegram supergroup that has forum mode enabled, addressed by a message_thread_id which is simply the message ID of the service message that created the topic. Once a group has topics, the chat ID alone no longer identifies a conversation: the real key is the chat and the thread together.

An HMAC signature is a keyed hash of a message, computed as defined in RFC 2104, that proves the sender knew a shared secret and that the bytes were not altered in transit. It is normally sent in an HTTP header alongside the payload it covers.

An ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is a weighted, evidence-based description of the account type that buys fastest, stays longest and expands most, used as the fit half of every qualification, routing and targeting decision.

An idempotency key is a client-generated unique string sent with a write request so the server can recognise a retry of that exact request and return the original result instead of performing the work a second time.

IMAP IDLE (RFC 2177) is an IMAP extension that lets a client say it is waiting and keep the connection open, so the server can push untagged notifications about new or changed messages the moment they happen instead of the client polling for them.

An interactive message is a WhatsApp message with type "interactive", which renders tappable UI inside the chat instead of plain text: reply buttons, a list menu, a call-to-action URL button, a product card or a Flow. Sent free-form it needs no template approval, but it can only go out while the 24-hour customer service window is open.

An invite link hash is the opaque token at the end of a private Telegram invite link, the part after t.me/+ or t.me/joinchat/. It is the only handle a private group or channel exposes to someone who is not a member, and Telegram's API takes it as a plain string in messages.checkChatInvite and messages.importChatInvite.

Jitter is deliberate randomness added to a delay, most often a retry delay, so that clients which failed at the same moment do not all retry at the same moment and rebuild the burst that caused the failure.

A free, valuable resource offered in exchange for a prospect's contact details. It is the entry point into a nurture flow.

Lead routing is the ordered rule set that decides which owner a new lead is assigned to and how quickly, turning an anonymous inbound record into one named person's responsibility.

A method for ranking prospects by their fit and engagement, so sales teams can focus on the contacts most likely to buy.

List-Unsubscribe is an email header defined in RFC 2369 that carries an https or mailto URI so the mail client can show a native unsubscribe button, and RFC 8058 extends it with List-Unsubscribe-Post so a single POST removes the recipient with no confirmation page and no login.

A merge variable is a named placeholder inside a message template (written as {{firstName}}) that the sending engine replaces with a value from each recipient's contact record at send time, so one template produces a personalised message for every contact.

A message template is a pre-registered, Meta-approved message structure that a business must use to start a WhatsApp conversation outside the 24-hour customer service window. It is created on a WABA, categorised as marketing, utility or authentication, referenced by name plus language, and filled in at send time with positional or named parameters.

Message-ID is the globally unique identifier RFC 5322 requires on every email, written as an addr-spec inside angle brackets, and it is the key that In-Reply-To and References use to reconstruct a conversation thread across every client and server that touches the message.

A messaging limit is the cap on how many unique customers a WhatsApp business phone number may start a conversation with in a rolling 24-hour period. Meta assigns it as a tier, raises it automatically when volume and quality justify it, and lowers it when a number stays at a red quality rating.

An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a lead that has crossed a documented fit-plus-behaviour threshold, which is the point at which marketing hands it to sales for a qualification conversation.

Telegram's custom application-layer protocol that powers the real Telegram client experience, separate from the simpler Bot API.

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is the percentage of respondents who answer 9 or 10 to a single likelihood-to-recommend question minus the percentage who answer 0 to 6, producing a figure between -100 and +100 that is a difference of two percentages rather than a percentage itself.

A CRM that unifies every customer conversation (email, DMs, live chat, voice) into one continuous thread per contact.

An opt-in is a recorded, affirmative act by which a person agrees to receive messages from a named business on a specific channel. On the WhatsApp Business Platform it is a policy requirement before any business-initiated message, it can be collected anywhere, and the business is responsible for keeping the evidence.

A peer ID is the numeric identifier Telegram gives to a user, a basic group, or a channel. MTProto keeps those three as separate ID namespaces, while the Telegram Bot API flattens them into one signed chat_id using sign and a -100 prefix, which is why the same conversation has two different numbers depending on which API you are looking at.

A Phone Number ID is the opaque numeric identifier the WhatsApp Business Platform assigns to each registered business phone number. It is the value that goes in the send endpoint path, POST /{phone-number-id}/messages, and it is not the phone number itself, not the WABA ID, and not the recipient's wa_id.

Pipeline velocity is the rate at which a sales pipeline turns into revenue, expressed as money per day: qualified opportunities multiplied by average deal value and win rate, divided by average sales cycle length in days.

Quality rating is Meta's per-phone-number health score on the WhatsApp Business Platform, shown as green, yellow or red. It is derived from recent recipient behaviour, principally blocks and reports, and a sustained red rating is what causes a number to be flagged and its messaging limit to be reduced.

A rate limit is a server-enforced ceiling on how many requests one caller may make in a given window. Exceed it and the server answers 429 Too Many Requests instead of doing the work, usually with headers that say how much budget is left and when it resets.

Impressions count how many times a piece of content was rendered, reach counts how many unique people or accounts saw it at least once, and dividing the first by the second gives frequency, the average number of times each person was exposed.

Retry-After is a standard HTTP response header, defined in RFC 9110, that tells the client how long to wait before repeating the request. Its value is either a number of seconds or an HTTP-date.

Round-robin assignment is a distribution rule that hands each new record to the next owner in a fixed cyclic order, so that over enough records everyone receives an equal, or weight-proportional, share.

A visual model of where every open deal sits in your sales process, used to forecast revenue and spot stalled opportunities.

A session string is a portable, serialized MTProto authorization: the data centre it belongs to plus the 256-byte auth key that Telegram issued when the account logged in. Anyone holding it is logged into that Telegram account, with no phone number, no SMS code, and no two-factor password required.

A shadowban is the practitioner term for a silent reduction in an account's distribution: posts, replies or messages still appear to send normally, but the platform stops showing them to people who do not already follow or know you, and no notification is issued.

A spam trap, or honeypot address, is an email address that belongs to no real person, planted or recycled by a mailbox provider or blocklist operator so that any message arriving at it is evidence the sender is mailing addresses it never obtained consent for.

SPF (Sender Policy Framework, RFC 7208) is a DNS TXT record that lists which hosts are allowed to send mail using your domain in the SMTP envelope sender, so a receiving server can check the connecting IP address against that list and return pass, fail, softfail, neutral, permerror or temperror.

A {a|b|c} template syntax that generates many message variants from a single source, used to keep bulk DMs unique.

An SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a lead a salesperson has personally examined and accepted into the pipeline after confirming, against a written checklist, that there is a real problem, a plausible budget and a reason to talk now.

A supergroup is a Telegram group implemented as a channel object with the megagroup flag set, which is what gives it up to 200,000 members, permanent shared history, granular admin rights, and chat-scoped message IDs. Basic groups, capped at 200 members, are a different object type in a different ID namespace entirely.

A suppression list is the set of recipient addresses a sending system must never contact again, assembled from unsubscribes, spam complaints, hard bounces, manual blocks and legal erasure requests, and checked in the sending worker immediately before every message leaves the queue.

TDLib, short for Telegram Database Library, is Telegram's own cross-platform C++ client library: it implements the full MTProto stack, keeps a local encrypted database of chats and messages, and exposes everything through a single asynchronous JSON interface. It is the officially supported way to build a Telegram client without implementing the protocol yourself.

The Telegram Bot API is Telegram's official HTTPS and JSON interface for bot accounts, reached at api.telegram.org/bot<token>/METHOD. Telegram runs the MTProto client for you on its own servers, which makes bots trivial to build but permanently unable to do the things only a logged-in user account can do.

A unified inbox is a single queue where messages from every channel (email, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, X and live chat) land in one thread per person, under one assignment model, one status model and one SLA clock.

A userbot is automation that logs in as an ordinary Telegram user account over MTProto instead of using a bot token, which lets it do everything a human can do: message people who never wrote first, join groups by invite link, read full history, and list members. That capability comes with real account risk, because Telegram polices behaviour on user accounts far harder than it polices bots.

A WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) is the container object inside Meta Business Manager that owns your WhatsApp business phone numbers, your message templates, and the quality and messaging-limit state attached to them. It is identified by a numeric WABA ID and it is the object your app subscribes to in order to receive WhatsApp webhooks.

A real-time HTTP callback fired by one system into another when an event happens. It is the push-based alternative to polling.

A webhook replay is a re-delivery of an event the sender already generated: the same frozen payload is POSTed to the receiver again, either automatically on the retry ladder or on demand once the receiver has been repaired.

A WhatsApp Flow is a multi-screen, form-like experience that opens inside the WhatsApp chat, defined by a declarative Flow JSON document of screens and components. It either runs entirely on its own content or exchanges encrypted requests with an endpoint you host, and the completed submission comes back to your webhook as an nfm_reply.