How to Pick the Best Live Chat Solution

April 19, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support, Customization, Intercom | by Debbie McCormick

We’re huge fans of live chat – at Zingtree, it has been a terrific way for us to get to know our customers and their needs. Not only is live chat proven to be the most sought-after way to contact a company, it also is a sound way to respond to site visitors and potential customers in a quicker and more personalized way. With many viable solutions out on the market, it can be difficult to narrow down your options to find the best possible one for your use case. For Zingtree, Intercom chat has been a gamechanger (you can read all about how we use Intercom and what it’s best features are here).

To nudge companies in the right direction, Practical eCommerce came up with a list of live chat features that should always be at the top of the list. Here’s just a sampling of their article that we thoroughly enjoyed:

Phone, email, and web support still rank as important when it comes to instilling trust. But the presence of live chat exceeds them all — even if shoppers don’t use it. Compared to other methods of communication, 92 percent of consumers prefer communicating via live chat. Roughly 80 percent prefer communicating via social networks.

Via MarTech

Here’s why live chat appeals to shoppers.

  • Quicker than any other method.
  • Allows visitors to multitask.
  • Instills trust.
  • Helps reduce the language barrier.
  • Can be implemented proactively.

The list that Practical eCommerce included is a great checklist to keep in mind when shopping around for a live chat support tool. From the complete list, we hand-picked some of the top live chat features you need to look out for:

  1. Canned responses
  2. Knowledge base or frequently-ask-questions integration
  3. File upload support
  4. Support and agent ratings
  5. Visitor tracking
  6. Chat tags and keywords
  7. Analytics integration

Self-service support is hugely popular among the majority of consumers – the ability to integrate with knowledge base customer support tools, like interactive decision trees, tutorials, and FAQs, is the perfect way to streamline support efforts and link online support systems together better. We use it ourselves to make sure that our support presence is simple, straightforward, and always helpful. Whenever customer data is collected through a decision tree form, this information can be stored and sent directly to the live chat window in order to fill in information gaps, as well as give you a better understanding of who you are talking to and what issues they are dealing with.

Keep reading on the Practical eCommerce blog for the rest of their recommended live chat implementation features, and get in touch with us to talk about how to get the most from your live chat and knowledge base integration.

Tags: , , , , | Comments

5 Essential Customer Support Tools That We Love

April 18, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support | by Bill Zing

customer support tools

As a B2B company, we’re no strangers to providing service and finding customer support tools that can improve how we identify issues, stay in contact, and share important information with those who need it within the company. As it’s well known in any industry out there, poor customer service experiences really do stay with the customer, and they can essentially erase all of the hard work and effort it took to get them in the door in the first place.

A recent survey reports that customer service is the number one priority for small business owners, and we at Zingtree are no exception. We’ve experimented over the years with the best ways to help combat support issues that can lead to even more damaging, long-term problems and promote better understanding, access, and customer experience.

Below are 5 incredible customer support tools that every support team can easily master, leading to more efficiency, streamlined communication, and happier customers.

1. Intercom

Perfect for: being more available to your customers 

Intercom has a complete suite of messaging-first products that all modern internet businesses can use to accelerate growth across the customer lifecycle — covering acquisition, engagement, and support. In essence, Intercom offers an all-in-one communication platform for live chat, email support, targeted messages, and more. We use Intercom for all of these great uses, which helps us stay connected with our customers as they are on our website, and set up automated emails for specific segmented customers to deliver tailored content.

Some of Intercom’s best features include:

  • An operator bot that can send qualified responses to customers in live chat when you’re away.
  • A flexible API so you can customize with integrations, keep everything in sync, and aggregate data more easily.

Here’s more information on how Intercom and Zingtree work together for even more customer support power. 

2. Basecamp

Perfect for: organizing internal teams and projects

Basecamp is a real-time project management system and team communication platform rolled up into one nice package. Used primarily for resource planning and long-term scheduling, it has awesome features for teams to keep track of project priorities. Whenever we get a new feature request, we log this straight into Basecamp, along with the contact info of the customer; and, as we do updates, we also use the platform to notify every customer who requested the feature. Not only does this process breed loyalty, but Basecamp makes it easy for us to log and organize all of our feature requests. We keep a continually evolving roadmap of what to do next, and it’s 99% customer driven.

Some of Basecamp’s best features include:

  • A full schedule display to see every to-do, timeline, and deadline in a calendar format.
  • The ability to forward important emails from your inbox straight to your account, where it can be discussed and specifications can be laid out.

3. Reply (by Buffer)

Perfect for: social media listening and support

Reply by Buffer is a fabulous tool that displays your tweets in what they refer to as “a real-time tweet inbox” that lets you streamline social media conversations in one centralized location, and then assign tasks and respond. While they boast the ability to connect social messages from Facebook and Instagram as well, we’ve primarily used it to keep things moving on our Twitter account – a real lifesaver when you’re working with someone on an issue or question.

Some of Reply’s best features include:

  • Automatically identifies any past conversations you’ve had with a user, so you never forget a detail.
  • GIF, image, and emoji support to keep things light and provide more context when needed.

4. Zingtree

Perfect for: building out the ideal knowledge base

Our very own Zingtree toolkit is also a powerful customer support tool to add to the list. Providing a fully-interactive environment for guiding customers through troubleshooters, FAQs, product support, process guides, and more in a simplified way, it’s perfect for support teams in companies of all sizes. There’s no technical know-how or coding required to get set up with using decision trees for support, and can be embedded directly into any website using just a small piece of HTML – even in emails! We use Zingtree internally to manage our knowledge base of information, as well as set up demo requests, and even provide end-to-end technical support.

Some of Zingtree’s best features include:

  • Robust integrations with email, live chat, CRM, and Helpdesk systems like Zendesk, Salesforce, and others.
  • Collecting data, feedback, and other key information from customers to streamline the support process.
  • Analytics and reports that can help track the performance of a decision tree, examine traffic patterns, point out demographic data, and more.

Here’s more information on how Zingtree integrates with other customer support tools like Zendesk, Salesforce, and more. 

5. Calendly

Perfect for: simple and straightforward scheduling 

Calendly is your source for ending the dreaded email tag loop, allowing you to share availability for meetings or appointments of any kind just with a quick link. Our business revolves around building relationships; we want to make sure each potential user knows how to extract the most out of Zingtree, and to get their implementation questions answered before they really start building decision trees. By automating the scheduling of meetings and demos, we save a lot of time in back-and-forth, get to know customers well, gather up great ideas by talking to people, as well as receive fewer support requests in the long run.

Calendly is integrated into our “Request a Demo” decision tree, which gathers information from our clients. In our calendar, we get a nice summary from the Zingtree session of what each prospective customer is looking for, which helps us set up the most relevant demo beforehand.

Some of Calendly’s best features include:

  • Integrates with most major calendar services, like Google Outlook, Office 365, and iCloud.
  • Detects which time zone a user/invitee is in and presents them with the correct one.

Here’s more information on how Calendly and Zingtree work together to create a more seamless user experience. 

 

Check out some of our other great posts around improving customer support:

 

Any questions on getting started with Zingtree customer support tools for your business? Get in touch with us!

Tags: | Comments

Decision Tree Creator: How to Make Great Interactive Knowledge Bases

April 12, 2018 | Categories: For Beginners, How To | by Debbie McCormick

Decision Tree Creator

For businesses in fields like eCommerce, technology, and insurance, building your own decision tree creator from scratch is costly and time-consuming. That’s why we created Zingtree, so non-technical people can build and maintain their own custom interactive decision trees to function as troubleshooters, call center scripts, product finders, interactive flowcharts, lead qualifiers, process flows, or other procedure-based knowledge. Managing this type of interactive content doesn’t require a developer or extensive technical know-how.

It’s helpful to understand what makes a well-designed decision tree. At Zingtree, we define a well-built decision tree as being:

  • Informative
  • Engaging
  • Visual
  • Intuitive
  • Useful
  • Concise

Zingtree is the leading decision tree creator tool, making the process of building, customizing, and deploying guided decision trees super simple. That being said, there are some general rules and best practices to keep in mind when using our decision tree creator.

1. Have a purpose, and define it well.

Every great project begins with a solid goal, and your decision tree is no exception. Using a decision tree creator without realizing the purpose of putting one together is an aimless task that can leave you confused and your decision tree over-complicated; it’s very important to lay out WHY you are creating the tree in the first place.

Are you trying to simplify an internal business process to promote best practices?

Are you revamping your whole customer support knowledge base system?

Do you need a platform for gathering key customer or client feedback?

These are all credible use cases that can require different specifics to be added into your decision tree, so it’s always good to figure this out first. For instance, an organization that is setting up an interactive knowledge base would need to consider how to link different decision trees together (using master trees), while one that is focusing on troubleshooting complex products would need to think about where screenshots, videos or diagrams come into play.

2. Outline your questions and answers.

Once you have your purpose defined, having a basic idea of the structure of your questions and answers is a natural next step that allows you to finesse the main flow of your decision tree. Just as you would do for an upcoming press release, how-to article, or internal memo, jotting down what you need to cover first will ensure that you don’t miss any important information in the final version.

A good tip for outlining here is to not forget about visuals. Any helpful media (including video, GIFs, photos, and illustrations) can be inserted into the Zingtree decision tree creation tools in order to convey more information in less space, so keep them in mind as you write up the copy for your tree. With our decision tree creator, you can also conveniently use Excel or Google Sheets to draft up what your questions and answers will be, then import them directly into Zingtree to clean up and launch.

3. Consider color psychology.

The world doesn’t exist in black and white, and neither should your interactive decision trees. What colors you choose to use for your final decision tree really does matter to the end-user – certain shades and tones can convey certain feelings and emotions, and evoke different responses from people. For example, studies have shown that some people looking at the color red saw an increased heart rate, which leads to more adrenaline being pumped into the bloodstream. On the other hand, cooler colors like blue and purple have shown to bring on feelings of calmness.

While we hope that you’ve done some testing to figure out what your current audience thinks and feels about your own branding and color schemes already, it’s still important to mention the science behind it all. Our decision tree creator comes fully-loaded with configurable Themes, the ability to upload custom CSS, and other customizations so that you can integrate brand elements, as well as influence the thought patterns of some of your end-users using the power of color.

4. Try not to over-complicate.

The purpose of an interactive decision tree in many use cases is to make things concise, easy, and straightforward. As such, it’s important that when using a decision tree creator you do your best to keep things simple. Drafting up perfect questions and answers in your outline is a great start for this, as you can use the time to cut down on copy and simplify the text as much as possible, without losing meaning or context. The decision tree creator tool provides several foolproof ways to help out so that you don’t over-complicate things:

  • If you have a lot of sub-processes, use a Master Tree to link to separate, discrete decision trees.
  • Shorter question and answers are easier for end-users to navigate, and they also make your reports more manageable.
  • Make use of the content area to explain things. This helps to make shorter questions and answers.
  • Add in icons, images, and other types of media to help point end-users in the right direction with ease.

5. Revisit and improve over time.

One huge factor in what makes a decision tree go from “usable” to “amazingly helpful” is the use of data and feedback to go back and make it every better. Our decision tree creator makes it easy to optimize your guided experiences over time, so you continually get the most from the platform. For instance, using Logic Nodes you can quickly set up A/B tests for experimenting with different messages, flowchart structures, and other offers to see which performs the best, and then optimize accordingly. Additionally, you can get set up to receive direct feedback from end-users on how useful your decision tree is, as well as always keep track of the activity patterns of your decision trees with in-depth reports.

When you follow some of our tried-and-true rules for how to best use a decision tree creator tool, you’ll be able to produce some incredibly powerful interactive decision trees which will delight your end-users. You can always take a look at our industry pages for Retail, Insurance, Customer Support, and more to find out just exactly how the Zingtree decision tree creator will work for you, or take a look at some real-live decision trees in the decision tree example Gallery.

Any questions along the way? We’re always here to help you make the most out of Zingtree for any use case. 

Tags: | Comments

February/March 2018 – Decision Tree Updates

April 9, 2018 | Categories: Product Updates, Zingtree News | by Bill Zing

We’re still getting a ton of great ideas from our customers, as well as the occasional “I can’t do this” message. The last couple month’s updates primarily focus on the little details that set Zingtree apart from any other solution, but there are a few new goodies as well.

Here’s what’s new:

  • Settings/Data has options to include these variables in the session: tree_id, tree_name, last_tree_id, last_tree_name (for Tal)
  • Agent Feedback option for sending agent feedback emails to a specific address, instead of all authors. (Tara)
  • Agent Alerts
  • New API call get_session_data_pure – removes “back” and “restart” clicks from session path.
  • ##library tag to load content from another node.
  • Agent Portal specific login page
  • Deleting agent feedback comments now has an option to send a message as well (Tara).
  • Kustomer integration now adds tags to nodes (Katie)
  • Added full-width textbox data entry field type (Lasse)


Some updates to existing features:

  • Reorganized Settings/Data tab area.
  • Logic Node editor now has tabs – just like content editor.
  • Added “Export to CSV” checkbox option in main reports tool page.
  • Session List report now shows lookup credits used (if any were used).
  • Session List report: If no sessions appear for DEV version, we now show a button for LIVE version reporting.
  • Session detail report now shows questions by default, not page titles.
  • Logic nodes now show variables from trees linking to and from the current tree, up to 8 levels.
  • No longer adds “score” as a score variable for Email, Link, Tree nodes
  • Tags now allow Unicode characters (Alfred G.)
  • Google sign-on now allowed for agent portal (Kwame)
  • Asks new users to confirm T&C and Privacy Policy (GDPR compliance)
  • Better color palette in node editor (Dean S.)
  • API JSON now returns in pretty-printed format for easier readability
  • Feedback comments now show in user’s timezone (Ian M.)
  • Patched security vulnerability in session tracking
  • Added session_notes to available Zapier data (Alok)
  • Hyphens now allowed in tags (Isaac W.)
  • Using Zingtree CDN for fonts (Roger A.)
  • Added tags as tag_ classes to node rendering (John H.)
  • Allows locale= parameter to be sent along in host.php to override browser’s default locale (Alok)
  • Now sends organization name into agent portal as a variable (for Ted B.)
  • Persistent buttons now spaced farther apart
  • Hosting lots of assets at assets.zingtree.com for faster browser load speed. (Roger A.)


And some fixes and performance enhancements:

  • Agent feedback messages no longer include slashes before apostrophes in the message text.
  • Organizations being paid for by another org now can enable the referral icon in Settings. (Alfred G.).
  • No longer does address verification lookups when loading tree with preloaded addresses (Jay H.).
  • Form data report now faster (Kyra).
  • Sessions List report now faster.
  • Should see fewer 504 or 524 errors on big reports since we increased the server time-out.
  • Extra spaces in list box data entry fields get removed properly (Nellie).
  • get_session_data API call would occasionally show wrong questions when a subtree was involved (Mark C.).
  • Webhooks mechanism disallows null values and arrays in return data (Daniel)
  • Centering or right aligning images in text editor now renders properly. (Chris)
  • Source list drop-down in Sessions List report no longer missing some agents (Chrissie)
  • Disabling Push Live still loaded Live tree in Agent Portal, messed up tag matching. (Alexandra R.)
  • Ill-formed taglist macros no longer cause deploying trees to hang. (Tara D.)
  • Button override colors work properly in all cases.
  • Button override class markers (like .btn.red ) no longer show in history display
  • Animated templates now wrap buttons properly in IE.
  • Importing CSV spreadsheets no longer allows variables with space characters in them (Daniel)
  • Single quotes in button click variable values now works properly (Isaac W.)
  • Dynamically generated list boxes from webhooks can now retain their previous selection after “back” is clicked (Raj P.)
  • ##treetaglist and ##taglist macros can now be properly combined in a page (Lasse)
  • get_session_data API calls now removes style prefix (i.e. .btn-red) from button text
  • JSON export no longer loses last character on occasion, output is more readable (Alfred G.)
  • Pressing BACK from root node no longer erases merge variables. (Jay H)
  • Copying trees now includes placeholders, hidden fields (Jay H.)
  • Edit node error message no longer goes to 404 page (BD)
  • Super-user with no trees now can see trees by other authors and assign themselves rights.
  • keep_vars_on_back=1 parameter no longer erases form data if a “back” was hit after first node (Jay H.)
  • Improved XSS detection so that formatted data isn’t changed (Michael B.)
  • Jumping to a tree node now keeps the form data stack properly in sync (Lazarus P.)
  • Can now update the Google Analytics account by erasing it (Josh)
  • Empty drop list data entry variables no longer throw an error.
  • Messages from overview.php now display properly.
  • Login forms ensure cookie is set and present.
  • Tree names with single quotes no longer cause browser error.
  • Clicking tree nodes in Zendesk app now updates Zendesk variables properly.
  • Patched author and agent logins to prevent CSRF attacks (logins into an unexpected account).
  • Going back over scoring nodes with a subtree jump now works properly. (Katie)
  • Now properly scrolls Thumbnails overview to last edited node.
  • Browser back button now works properly in Preview tool.
  • Alert messages with @ in them now show (introduced from security fix).
  • Agent Portal – Hides DEV version of a tree if a live version is present (Matthieu).
  • Security Fix: Prevented URLs that can change emails or passwords of logged-in users.
  • Security fix: Locked down alerts system to display validated Zingtree-generated messages only.
  • Confirmation emails now use https for verification links.
  • Wizard tutorial page now up-to-date.
  • Uses new LIVE version of Designer help (with embedded video)

Got a suggestion for us? Just chat us up.

| Comments

How to Reduce Agent Turnover in Call Centers

April 5, 2018 | Categories: Call Centers, Training, Use Cases | by Tiffany

Keeping your customers happy is only half of the battle in call centers today – making sure that your call center agents and supporting employees are happy, productive, and well-informed is another huge piece of the customer service battle. Agent turnover (also known as agent attrition) has a dramatic effect on how call centers can ultimately perform and have been a problem for decades.

Let’s say that one of your best up-and-coming agents – we’ll call her Sally – has decided to quit her role as a call center agent after about a year. The next steps of the process include some familiar actions: processing paperwork through HR, closing out payroll, and beginning the process of finding a new hire to replace her. What comes next is a series of interviews, more paperwork, and then an in-depth training period in which to get the new agent up to speed. When all is said and done, your call center has lost thousands in time, human resources, and repetitive training efforts; and, if the new hire doesn’t end up working out, you’re back at the beginning.

Tips for Lowering Agent Attrition

A recent article from Contact Center Pipeline goes into more detail on how call centers can effectively lower attrition rates: using proper recruiting techniques, investing in training programs, evaluating key metrics, and more. Here’s what the article had to say about one of the biggest factors in agent turnover – training programs:

This is one area that no company should ever try to scrimp on. Inadequate training can leave agents lacking confidence and feeling frustrated on the floor because they are ill-prepared. All employees should have substantial communications and product training before they are even allowed to talk to one of the customers of the company.

And it does not end there; managers should recognize that some agents need more intensive training compared to others. Managers should coordinate with the training department about continued customized training and coaching for each individual agent.

By personalizing the training and development of agents, you are addressing their specific needs based on their current level of competence. This way, those who need the most attention get it without holding others back.

Your agents are not the only ones who need training; your supervisors and managers should be trained as well. In fact, a lot of agent attrition can be attributed to mismanagement.

Provide your supervisors and managers with skills on how to identify the level of help needed by their agents, how to provide constructive feedback, and proper coaching skills that can elevate not only the agent’s skills but confidence as well.

Competent managers and supervisors will reduce frustration from your workforce and should inevitably reduce resignations.

Setting Up Simple to Use Process Flows and Knowledge Bases

Making it easy for your agents to follow procedures and find information goes a long way towards reducing on-the-job frustration; this is one area where Zingtree shines. By guiding agents step-by-step through processes, and eliminating unnecessary content by showing just the information needed at every step, agents will be able to follow standard operating procedures successfully, every time. Zingtree decision trees make creating these sort of process flows a snap.

Developing Training Programs That Work

Industry-wide experience shows having a consistent training program that follows industry and internal best practices is one of the most powerful ways to lower agent turnover rates. 7 out of 10 people say that training and development opportunities influence in their decision to stay with a company – why wouldn’t you want to address that with proper, consistent training?

One of the simplest ways to introduce a better training program into a call center environment is the use of interactivity for greater engagement and retention. Rather than relying on pages long PDFs that detail company processes and in-depth guidebooks for handling everyday occurrences, interactive decision trees for training cut down on the bulk of need-to-know information and presents materials in a digestible format.

Guided decision trees are quickly becoming a go-to resource for implementing easy-to-follow procedures and simulations that make training more streamlined, effective, and enjoyable. Some of the best training features found in Zingtree decision trees include:

  • Allowing employees to provide Agent Feedback on every training decision tree to involve employees in the overall process more.
  • Being able to emulate different potential scenarios to lead trainees through new or complicated learning environments.
  • Asking questions in an interview-style way, which helps to keep things moving quickly and keep employees more engaged.

 

You can read more of the Contact Center Pipeline article here, and take a closer look at how to create an interactive training program using Zingtree here. Any questions? Reach out to us anytime you need.

Tags: , , , , | Comments

How to Create a Master Decision Tree

April 3, 2018 | Categories: How To, Use Cases | by Bill Zing

Many of our customers with large decision tree systems in place ask for guidance on how to make a “master tree” which links to individual trees for troubleshooting or other processes. This is especially helpful for organizations that use Zingtree to build and publish completely interactive FAQs. In this article, we’ll discuss how it’s done.

Building a Master Tree

Creating a Master Tree is a simple, yet powerful process that consists of two over-arching steps:

  1. Build the individual decision trees.
  2. Build a Master Tree with one node, using a “blank starter tree.”

After building your individual trees and troubleshooters, there are a couple of distinct ways to build a Master Tree. We’ve created an example Master Tree for a few of our Gallery product finders.

Method #1 – Using Tree Tag Lists

1. Use the Settings tool to add tags to the trees you want to include in the Master Tree. For this example, we added the tag “master_finder” to our product finder decision trees.

2. Create a new decision tree to act as your Master Tree.

3. In the Master Tree root node’s content area, include a tree tag list. For our example, we tagged our trees with “master_finder,” so the tree tag list looks like this:

#‌#treetaglist-any: master_finder##

Method #2 – Using Tree Nodes

1. In the Master Tree, add tree nodes for each tree to link to.

2. In the root node of the Master Tree, create a button for each tree node. This will allow an end-user or customer to quickly jump to any other relevant decision tree from the Master Tree.

Example Master Tree

Here’s a look at our Master Tree in action:

 

Want more tips? Our blog is chock-full of them. Any questions? We’re always here to help. 

 

This article was originally published on Nov 7, 2017, but is just as accurate as ever!

Tags: , , , | Comments

How Call Center Scripting Software is Giving New Life to Old Customer Service

March 29, 2018 | Categories: Call Centers | by Debbie McCormick

Call Center Scripting Software

For call centers and organizations, efficiency, effectiveness, and personalization are critical drivers in how a customer will react or respond to a communication, especially considering the aversion to the dreaded phone tree. Organizations like Easy Insurance Scripts are using call center scripting software to help agents achieve positive results with phone support, while also adopting a self-service, guided mentality. Call Center scripting software is the wave of the future in call center and customer support technology, providing a fresh platform for traditional customer service efforts to flourish in a few important ways.

1. Standardizing for Best Practices and Accurate Information

Using call center scripting software to standardize processes across every single agent is the best way to ensure that employees are following standard operating procedures and best practices and that customers are ultimately receiving the correct information. Plus, Zingtree makes it easy for call center agents to give relevant feedback to script authors, thereby continually improving the quality of information over time. When a call center script has been tested, observed, and approved due to high performance, it can only mean positive things: customers are satisfied, agents are happy and efficient, and brand loyalty goes through the roof.

2. Integrating More with Existing Online Tools

In a call center environment, many CRM tools and other applications are used in order to keep track of communications, customer data, scheduling, and more. A call center scripting software integrates directly with any CRM tool (like Zendesk, Desk.com, Salesforce, and others) to provide a seamless experience for agents and frictionless sharing of collected customer data. It’s incredibly important (and vital to a call center’s performance) to have these types of tools “talk” to each other and be able to share data. For instance, having the ability to integrate Zingtree with a platform like Zendesk allows call center agents to access data about a specific script-based conversation directly within Zendesk.

3. Making it Easier to Make Improvements

Call center scripting software makes it easier to improve and optimize scripts regularly, as standards change, or as things change with the company. With powerful analytics to track performance, reports helping decipher the user’s journey, and ways to easily collect customer feedback every step of the way, it’s far easier than many traditional call center tools to keep things running smoothly.

In Blue Shield’s case, they have “begun implementing Zingtree to bring the written process to a more interactive state” in order to truly optimize and improve the process of customers receiving the answers they need. By having this interactive environment for agents to work within, gathering new information and other data from customers that can ultimately help them becomes a simple, automated task.

 

Zingtree call center scripting software is the preferred tool for many businesses and call centers to develop, deploy, and monitor call center scripts and interactive decision trees. Companies like Blue Shield of California and Easy Insurance Scripts partner with Zingtree to combine call center experience with the dynamic technology of interactive decision trees and call center scripting. With a toolkit for building interactive training simulations and call scripts, independent agents and large call centers alike are more effective, productive, and helpful.

“For me, the ROI of Zingtree is immediate. Introducing standardized decision tree scripts for insurance has allowed the insurers in my network to really thrive. With scripts for guiding conversations, interactive trees to train new agents, and the reporting that comes along with it, agents are able to provide a better customer experience that’s consistent and informative.” – Ted Baker, Easy Insurance Scripts Founder & CEO

Want to learn more about Zingtree’s powerful call center scripting software? 

Take a look at our Call Center solutions here.

See some call center script examples here.

Get in touch with us anytime here.

Tags: | Comments

4 Reasons Why Marketing & Sales Need to Adopt Decision Trees

March 27, 2018 | Categories: Sales & Marketing, Use Cases | by Bill Zing

Decision Trees for Marketing

You’ll often hear us talk about how decision trees can save contact centers and support managers valuable time and expended energy, but did you know that this interactive toolkit can also benefit those in the marketing and sales world?

With a simple question-and-answer flow, it becomes much easier for marketers and sales staff to boost their own productivity and efficiency, collect business-driving information and much more. Here are just a few of the ways that building decision trees can boost your game.

1. Streamline Lead Qualification

Every B2B marketer and sales staff is well-versed in the importance of lead generation and qualification for the continued health of a business – without new interest being cultivated, a company simply cannot grow.

Placing these leads into a robust decision tree based on key classifiers for your ideal customer ensures that the most qualified leads are quickly delivered to the right person, for faster and more accurate follow-up. Including the types of content, communications and promotions to best serve to these potential new consumers, along with the correct flow of distribution for proper sales resources, is a great way to enhance the lead qualification process overall.

2. Build & Optimize Sales Funnels

It’s incredibly important, in any business or industry vertical, to focus on the customer’s complete path to purchase; the sales funnel is, in essence, a decision tree looked at in a slightly altered way.

By designing your initial sales funnel (or any other process) in Zingtree prior to consumer use, you’ll quickly be able to spot and measure any inconsistencies or trouble areas through simple user testing. If your business or organization is struggling with their current sales funnel flow, creating and testing decision trees can vastly excel the improvement process.

3. Improve Procedural Standards

Following and improving corporate procedures, including procurement processes (acquiring or purchasing products/services from an external source), are another factor that should not be overlooked.

By using decision trees to build internal codifying systems, getting employees to follow corporate procedures, and continually optimizing these processes, any company can effectively boost these procedural standards.

4. Narrow Down Designs

Marketers are always serious when design is involved; after all, how something looks is directly related to how a consumer perceives a product or service offering!

Companies that use decision trees as part of a decision-making process can easily generate a Zingtree based on potential design (or copy) options to gather direct feedback on team preferences. Rather than communicating in longer form, a decision tree is ideal for collecting quantitative data to drive faster decisions.

 

Ready to get started? Sign up for a free trial or contact us to see how Zingtree can help improve your sales and marketing efforts.

This article was originally published on May 11, 2016.

Tags: , , , , , | Comments

Call Centers: Here Are 10 Knowledge Management Mistakes That You May Be Making

March 22, 2018 | Categories: Call Centers, Training | by Tiffany

Knowledge management is one of the most important business functions in any industry – for call centers, in particular, having an effective knowledge base isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s necessary.

Sharing mission-critical information in a digestible format is one of the most powerful ways to keep customers, employees, and stakeholders in-the-know when it comes to customer support, product information, training practices, business processes, and more. That’s exactly why we created Zingtree in the first place; to provide an interactive knowledge management platform that presents just the essential information at each step in the agent’s process flow. In the call center world, interactive knowledge bases and documentation are an incredible alternative to traditional articles, making it easier:

  • for customers and call center employees to engage with and understand the content at-hand
  • to cut down on time spent solving problems and finding the specific information
  • and to enrich information and improve retention with visuals, media, and other interactive elements

In a recent Call Centre Helper article, the author, Craig Rich, delves into how knowledge management functions in the call center landscape, as well as several mistakes that are made often and tips on how to fix them. He shares how knowledge is split into three main categories:

Explicit Knowledge: Formal and systematic, and usually in the form of written documents, it’s easy to communicate and store, such as information found in documentation, books, instruction manuals and on the web. It can also be in an audio or visual form such as instructional diagrams or videos.

Tacit Knowledge: Typically, the information held in people’s heads. The trick is to either enable them to share this information via tools and processes or to connect these people with those needing the information.

Embedded Knowledge: Information stored within policies, procedures, legal documentation and other unstructured data (such as social media). This can require observation, insight and analytics tools to identify this knowledge.

For every type of knowledge that needs to be properly conveyed, managing how it’s processed and presented for consumption can present a new series of challenges without the right tools on-hand. Traditional linear documents can be confusing for agents and can lead to fruitless searches and unnecessary steps being taken; interactive decision tree-based content is much easier to navigate, and also presents the added benefit of enabling reporting to track each step of every procedure – on every single call.

One of the main purposes of sharing knowledge within a contact centre is to ensure that information is easy to navigate and use for all team members. This information should be the latest and most accurate on record and there should be a common source for it, which should become an obvious place for the team to go when seeking information… If applied and planned strategically, knowledge management will allow the contact centre to be the heart of the organisation, demonstrating value far beyond the basic customer interface.

This is where having a complete, comprehensive system in place for knowledge management comes in. With a well-developed strategy for knowledge base management in a call center, there’s a huge wave of benefits that come with it, including:

– Improved contact centre metrics such as Average Handle Time, First Contact Resolution and Customer Satisfaction.
– Lowering the Time to Competency for new employees.
– Lowering overall training costs.
– More accurate call logging, and reduced after-call work (ACW).
– Enabling wider sharing of information across the whole organisation.
– Operational efficiencies communicating key information more quickly.
– Consistency across an omnichannel implementation.
– Ability to create a “trusted source” or a “single source of truth” for key information that needs to be shared either internally or with your customer base.
– A source of intelligence to help product teams improve future versions of products or services.
– Enabling emerging technologies such as AI, chatbots, robotic process automation.
– Increased Employee Engagement.

As the author stresses, it’s important to understand the mistakes that can arise when preparing a complete knowledge management strategy, as well as implementing a system for it, in order to succeed. So, what are the common mistakes and what can be done to fix them? 

Keep reading the full Call Centre Helper article here >>

 

For a call center, an interactive knowledge base can serve as a self-service support platform for both employees and customers alike, offering a guided format for presenting important information, tutorials, and how-tos in a categorized and clickable display. Call centers and other organizations that use decision trees to create a fully-interactive knowledge base have seen a 20% reduction in support-related costs, and ultimately have happier customers and employees due to the saved time and effort.

When it comes to creating a customized, in-depth, interactive knowledge base for call centers, Zingtree has the most powerful toolkit for getting started. With the ability to build decision trees that host product/service information, troubleshooting help, and call scripts securely, as well as integrate with popular CRM tools, it’s a one-of-a-kind way to streamline and simplify knowledge management.

What do you think about the future of knowledge management? Join the conversation with us on Twitter. 

Head over to the Zingtree Knowledge Base to see how we set up our own interactive knowledge base with decision trees.

Tags: , , , , , | Comments