Category Archives: Business

Zendesk Agent Scripting App – Version 10

October 19, 2017 | Categories: Business, Call Centers, How To, Integrations, Product Updates, Training, Zendesk, Zopim | by Bill Zing

If you’re a Zendesk user in a Contact Center environment,  you’ll want to be using our Zendesk Agent Scripting app.  This makes it easy to guide, train and onboard agents and is a huge productivity booster for everyone.

The Agent Scripting app appears as a button in the right-hand panel:

Click Open Script, and you’ll see your decision tree in a pop-over like this:

 

Benefits of the Zendesk Agent Scripting App

  • Standardization: Show a guided path for each ticket, so that Agents follow the proper operating policies or troubleshooting procedures.
  • Pause and Resume: If a ticket is transferred, the supervisor or new agent is taken to the last place in the script, and can see the history of the previous steps taken.
  • Automatic Script Selection: The Agent Scripting App can choose a script based upon the Zendesk brand, Zendesk ticket tags, or the value of a custom field.
  • Agent Feedback: Agents can send feedback directly to the authors of the decision trees with a single button click. Feedback is delivered to each author’s email, and includes the tree ID and node number where the feedback was sent from.
  • Automatic Ticket Updating: Tags and custom fields in the ticket can be updated from actions in the script – either via buttons clicked in the script, or from data entry collected.

New Features in Version 10

If  you’re using a previous version of the Zendesk Agent Scripting app, you may want to upgrade to take advantages of these new benefits:

  • Pop-overs: Scripts now appear as pop-overs, rather than being constrained to the right-hand panel.
  • Ticket Updating: Your tickets can automatically update by navigating the script, or by entering data into Zingtree Data Entry Fields. For example, the start of your script could offer the agent a choice of a product, and the “product” field in your ticket will be automatically selected when the agent makes a choice.

Note: Don’t remove the current version of Agent Scripting until you are ready to make the switch. Versions 9 and earlier may not be updated going forward.

Getting Started

Here are the basic steps to get up and running:

  1. Build an interactive decision tree script with Zingtree (or use one of our demos to start).
  2. Install the Agent Scripting App (version 10) into Zendesk.
  3. Configure the Agent Scripting app within Zendesk.
  4. If you want to have your decision tree scripts update your  Zendesk tickets, you’ll need to add variables and/or tags to your Zingtree tree to match your Zendesk setup.
  5. If you want to enable automatic script selection, you’ll need to add tags to your trees in Zingtree and configure the Zendesk Agent Scripting app properly.

Installing the Agent Scripting App into Zendesk

Download and configure the Zendesk Agent Scripting App version 10 like so:

  1. Download the Agent Scripting app here.
  2. In Zendesk, click the Admin icon and go to Apps > Manage.

  3. Click Upload Private App.

  4. The Upload App page appears.

  5. Enter “Zingtree Agent Scripting” for the App Name.
  6. For App File, locate the file zingtree-agent-scripting-v10.zip you downloaded in step 1.
  7. Click Upload, then confirm if necessary.

Configuring the App

Once you’ve uploaded the app, click App Configuration to see the configuration screen:

Here’s what each item does:

Tree ID: This is the default tree that appears when agents click “Open Script”.  (You should always have a default tree.)

Hide Integration Setup Info: When you are setting up Agent Scripting for the first time, you may need some information about your Zendesk setup to take advantage of automatically updating ticket fields. An “Integration Setup Info” link appears by default when you first install the app, and ticking this option hides it.

Match Tree Tags to Zendesk Brand: If this option is checked, the subdomain of the selected brand will be matched to a Zingtree tree tag.  Any matching tree or trees will appear.  For example, if the brand subdomain is xyz.zendesk.com, any trees tagged as xyz (using the Zingtree Settings tool) will appear.

Match Tree Tags to Zendesk Ticket Tags: If checked, the values in the Zendesk ticket tags will be matched with your Zingtree tree tags (set via the Zingtree Settings tool) to show one or more matching scripts.

Match Tree Tags to values in a Custom field: If you want to use a custom field value to show matching scripts, enter the Zendesk custom field identifier here. The field name can be found using the Integration Setup Info link that first appears in the sidebar when you install the app.

Zingtree API key: Each organization in Zingtree has an API key, which is used to match scripts. If you’re using one of the tag matching options, this is required. Your API key can be found at zingtree.com under Help, API.

Enabling Automatic Script Selection

Automatic Script Selection works by matching tree tags you set in Zingtree to values in the Brand, Tags, or a custom field in a Zendesk ticket. For example, if a tree is tagged with “astrology”, and the ticket tags include “astrology”, then that tree appears. If several trees match, then they will all appear, and the agent can choose one.

To open a script based upon Brand:

  • Add tags to your trees for each brand you want to match. So if one of your brands is xyz.zendesk.com, use xyz as a tree tag in Zingtree for all the trees you want to show.
  • Make sure Match Tree Tags to Zendesk Brand is checked in the App Configuration.

To open a script based upon Zendesk ticket tags:

  • Add tags to your trees for each tag you want to match. So if one of your ticket tag possibilities is “billing”, use billing as a tree tag in Zingtree for all the trees you want to show.
  • Make sure Match Tree Tags to Zendesk Ticket Tags is checked in the App Configuration.

To open a script based upon a custom field:

  • Add tags to your trees for each possible custom field value you want to match. So if one of your custom field values is “billing”, use billing as a tree tag in Zingtree for all the trees you want to show.
  • Make sure the proper Zendesk field variable name is entered for  Match Tree Tags to values in a Custom Field is checked in the App Configuration.


Adding tags to a tree in Zingtree is done like this:

  1. Select a tree from My Trees.
  2. Go to the Settings tool.
  3. Enter or select a tag from the Tags field.

  4. Click Update Settings.

How to Configure to Update Ticket Fields

As agents navigate through your trees, their use of the decision tree scripts you create can automatically update any custom fields in that ticket. This can be done in two ways:

  • By clicking a button in a script
  • By entering data into Zingtree data entry fields.

The key is to use variable names in your Zingtree that match the ones used in Zendesk.

First of all, determine the names of the variables in Zendesk by clicking the Integration Setup Info link in the Agent Scripting app. You’ll see something like this:

You’ll see the label for the field as it appears in Zendesk’s ticket form, and the Zendesk variable next to it. In the above example, the Product custom field variable is custom_field_22899289. This is a drop-down selector, and the Zendesk values for the field options are astrology and insurance.

For the rest of this example, we’ll use custom_field_22899289 as the custom field variable.

To make a button selection update a custom field, you’ll set it up in your Zingtree as follows:

  1. Go to the Overview tool, and edit the node whose button selections will update the ticket.
  2. Click Edit Buttons (or Add Buttons if you don’t have any buttons defined). The button editor appears:

  3. Make sure Assign Button Click Variable is checked. This makes the other options appear.
  4. For the Button Click Variable, enter your custom field variable from Zendesk (custom_field_22899289 in the example).
  5. For each button option, enter the value of the variable under Score/Value. If this is a drop-down list in your Zendesk ticket, you’ll need to make sure the Score/Value entered matches one of the drop-down option values as shown in the Integration Setup Info.
  6. Click Save Changes when you’re done configuring buttons.

Bonus: Adding Tags via button clicks:

Button clicks can also add tags to a ticket. In the above example, clicking Something Else adds the tag other_tag to the ticket. Just include the tag name with two colons after the button text. So entering a button like Something Else::other_tag will add the tag other_tag to the ticket if this is clicked, but agents will only see Something Else as an option.

Using Zingtree Data Entry Fields to Update Tickets

Just like the above example, you can also use Zingtree for data entry, and have that data automatically transferred to your ticket. The key is to use the same variable name in Zingtree as you used in Zendesk. The Integration Setup Info link in the sidebar will give you those Zendesk variable names.

Example: If you have a text entry field in Zingtree you want to update into the Zendesk field custom_field_1234, you would set up the variable name as follows:

 

Try It with Example Data

You can use trees from the Zingtree Gallery to see how the Agent Scripting app works.

For a single tree, enter ’14’ as the Tree ID. This will show an Astrology website troubleshooter example.

For multiple trees, see how a tree can be selected by tag by doing the following:

  1. Enter 6a103737e44e4aa6e1e4b6b0bcb46f83 as the API key.
  2. Make sure Match Tree Tags to Zendesk Ticket Tags is checked.
  3. Try entering one or more of these tags into a ticket: “zingtree”, “astrology”, “pet_rock”.

Any questions? We’re always here to help. 

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How Decision Trees for Insurance Can Simplify Policies & Procedures

October 13, 2017 | Categories: Business, Case Studies, Use Cases | by Bill Zing

decision trees for insurance

Having exceptional customer service isn’t reserved for typical B2C companies. In such a tumultuous and often scary industry (for consumers, at least), insurance companies and agents must also take a close look at how their customers are perceiving the assistance they are getting. Understanding is also a huge part of this customer experience. Why? Because insurance is complicated.

Improving Insurance Call with Decision Tree Scripts

For many insurance companies, automation is an angle that’s gaining traction for providing more streamlined and consistent customer service. Our partnership with EasyInsuranceScripts.com is a great example of how decision trees are being used to simplify.

Simply put, Ted Baker, the Founder of EasyInsuranceScripts.com, envisioned a more streamlined way to improve how independent insurance agents were being trained, guided through complicated conversations and policy selections, and processing claims. In an industry with so many small, yet important, details to be understood, these conversations and processes can become intimidating very quickly.

With our own knowledge and experience in simplifying the complex, we knew decision trees would be an ideal fit. Joining forces between Zingtree and EasyInsuranceScripts.com has allowed Ted’s services to offer the most comprehensive set of resources for independent insurance agents as a result.

“It’s amazing that I’m able to automate all of this for independent insurers,” says Ted. “For me, the ROI of decision trees 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.“

Hard Numbers: Where the Data Fits In

While each insurance agent or organization may have varying experiences, industry knowledge is key in understanding how much this kind of customer service and care matters for insurance. McKinsey recently published an article on how focusing on improving customer experience has a direct effect on growth and profit in the insurance industry:

McKinsey’s global research across industries shows that improving the customer experience can do far more to drive profitable growth than raising advertising spending or lowering prices. Some executives may still see insurance as a low-engagement, disintermediated category, but analytics prove that in an industry where profits are highly concentrated, leading carriers are delivering customer experiences that inspire loyalty and attract new customers frustrated by their experiences with their current carriers.

Here’s a handy chart that helps to summarize how insurers must improve the customer journey:

 

A typical insurance carrier today delivers customer experiences via separate functions (marketing, distribution, underwriting, claims), using a website, sales call center, service department, and so on, most managed by different executives with different goals and metrics. This structure may have its purposes, but it overlooks the fact that from the customer perspective, the experience is often a single journey.

Real-World Example: Decision Tree for Insurance

Here’s a sample tree, derived from one of the Easy Insurance Scripts trees:

 

 

Have any questions? You can learn more about how to simplify insurance products and processes on our site or feel free to reach out directly.

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Frictionless Data Collection: The Easiest Way to Get Customer Information Online

September 25, 2017 | Categories: Business, Case Studies, How To, Sales & Marketing, Use Cases | by Debbie McCormick

We really can’t emphasize enough how important customer data is — for any company in any industry. Gathering data from customers should be easy for them, and it should lead to accurate information for you. Without collecting key information, you can never truly understand your current and potential customers and their desires. How long do you think your company could survive without good data?

Frictionless Data Gathering

Interactive decision trees simplify the process of collecting information on any web page that customers land on first. Just by prompting customers to click a button in a decision tree, you’re collecting data!

Once you get customers engaged with a decision tree, they’ll be hooked. You can then ask for name and contact information using data entry fields. This data is easily sent to you via email, viewed with Zingtree’s reports, or exported into any database or CRM system. Zingtree can validate this data as well.

Case Study: Zingtree

We use this technique ourselves – the Zingtree “Request a Demo” button on our Contact Us page is an example that asks some questions, and then leads to this form:

Before our potential customers see this form, they have clicked some buttons to answer a few basic questions. And at the end of the process, we get an email with all of their information and can schedule a demo with the right expert. It’s an awesome source of leads for us.

The emails we receive at the end of the process look like this:

XYZ Corp requested a demo

Zingtree session data:

Q: I would like to:
A:  Request  a Demo
Q: Next:
A: Continue
Q: How will you be using the Zingtree decisions trees you build?
A: External Use
Q: Are you looking to integrate Zingtree with other applications?
A: Yes
Q: Next:
A: Continue
Q: Are you interested in self-hosting Zingtree?
A: No
Q: Next
A: Continue
Q: Finish:
A: Send Demo Request

score: 0 
zt_browser_language: en 
zt_browser: IE 
zt_country: United States 
zt_regionName: California 
zt_city: San Diego 
zt_zip: 92121 
zt_ip: 208.87.212.000 
zt_isp: Surfer
zt_org: surfer.com 
name: Jane  
company: Customer 
email: jane@xyzcorp.com 
contact_number: 8882121000 
integrations: Looking to retrieve all data points and button elections in a spreadsheet  
send_out: 1


Step 1: Build a Tree, and add a  Data Collection Form

Ready to put this technique to use?

First, engage your customers with some questions answered as button clicks in an interactive decision tree, and at the end of the process ask for more info via a form. It’s easy for customers, and they are providing you fantastically helpful data.

What needs are you filling? Depending on the goal, you’ll want to be collecting different customer information. You can even automatically gather customer location, language, region, browser and more.

Step 2: Refine and Distribute Data

Before you send or publish any decision trees with forms, be sure to check your writing. It’s an often overlooked aspect of surveys, questionnaires and other means of data collection, but contributes greatly to the value of the information gathered.

Step 3: Analyze and Verify Collected Information

If you’re collecting certain information such as a customer’s shipping address, email, or phone number, validating that information before putting it to use can save you a lot of time and money. Bad information wastes valuable resources! Our interactive decision trees allow you to validate information using built-in data cleansing.

When all is said and done, Zingtree’s analytics and reports or API will help you collect and analyse key data directly from your customers themselves.

 

Take a look at the Gallery for a more in-depth look at how data entry forms work in different scenarios. Any questions? Reach out to us anytime.

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Using Product Finders to Improve eCommerce Conversions

September 7, 2017 | Categories: Business, Sales & Marketing | by Bill Zing

For businesses with lots of product SKUs, helping customers find the right product is a sure-fire way of increasing sales and conversion rates; Zingtree is a perfect solution. Guided product selection is a new kind of strategy that allows customers to help themselves, self-solve, and locate exactly what they need as quickly as possible.

From picking out the perfect pair of sunglasses to the right kind of bike, to figuring out the ideal package of services, these “product finders” can help customers locate the right product in the easiest way possible.

The Facts: Customers Want Easy Access

Key metrics and figures in the eCommerce world only work to confirm what we know: simple, guided product finders are the wave of the future where customer journey and improving conversion rates are concerned. Let’s take a quick look.

Stat #1: On average, people spend about 51% of their time on their mobile phones.

It’s incredibly convenient for buyers to browse your store on mobile in short, quick, sessions during the spare pockets of time they have throughout the day. Online stores should always be optimized for quick shopping experiences that help customers find what they need within the fastest possible route. If they can’t find what they need, they’ll move on.

Stat #2: 94% of companies see “higher engagement and conversion rates” as benefits of a commitment to customer experience.

Customer experience is all about personalization. When you take the time and effort to customize an experience to specific people, they are far more likely to enjoy it and walk away feeling positive. Without any personalization, consumers can quickly jump to the assumption that those products or brand are not for them.

Stat #3: 74% of online shoppers rate product selection as important during the online search process.

That’s right — about 3/4 of all online consumers consider product selection as one of the most important parts of the search and purchase process. When you think about it, it really makes sense; making it as simple as possible to locate the right product is critical to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What Are Product Finders?

Product finder decision trees are the perfect way to set up customers for success in a personalized, self-solving, mobile-friendly environment. Instead of the traditional eCommerce site boasting pages and pages of products, product finders allow customers to take the lead using well-thought out, pre-programmed guidance.

Nationally-recognized baseball bat manufacturer, Phoenix Bats, is a perfect example of how product finders have a direct impact on happy customers and better conversion rates.

After building and implementing a custom decision tree bat selector tool on their website to guide customers to the perfect bat for them, Phoenix Bats saw vast improvements to overall sales and revenue. Read the full case study here.

Tips for eCommerce Product Finders

No one product finder should look or feel the same — each eCommerce business’ brand should always shine through. Here are our top 3 tips for creating interactive product locators that are as helpful as they are nice to look at:

1. Create pop-up trees.

Just a few short lines of code can allow you to publish and present decision tree product finders as fun pop-ups! Shown as a button as popping up in a clean overlay window, it’s one of our many publishing options to fit any eCommerce business needs.

2. Customizations are key.

We make it easy to inject some personality a few different ways, custom CSS files being the main one. After having a designer create the perfect file, just add to your decision tree product finder to ramp up the style — take a look at one of our customer’s awesome uses of this. You can also do things like build color buttons, add images and videos, and insert GIFs for something extra informative.

3. Use for support improvements.

Interactive decision trees aren’t just for helping guide customers to the right products, they are also used for helping guide customers to the right answers and solutions. Any FAQ item, tutorial, or troubleshooting article can easily be reformatted as a decision tree, allowing customers to more easily self-solve and stay happy.

You can check out our Gallery of examples for even more inspiration.

Have any questions or want help getting started? We’re always here for you.

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Repeating Forms in Decision Tree Data Gathering

July 12, 2017 | Categories: Business, Call Centers, How To, Product Updates | by Bill Zing

Our call center customers are so enthusiastic about Zingtree that we get some awesome feature requests. In particular, more and more operations are using decision trees for collecting data. One essential part is to be able to collect information on an indeterminate number of items.

For example, an insurance application may need to collect names and ages of each family member – be it one or twenty. Zingtree’s Repeating Forms capability fulfills this need.

How Repeating Forms Work

Quick dive: Try this demo tree from the Gallery.

The details: A node can collect multiple forms, one at a time. First, the agent starts with one form:

The agent can click Add Another to enter a second family member:

This can continue for multiple family members. At the end of the process, when the agent clicks the Continue button in this tree, the tree’s session will data variables set for each family member, like so:

Configuring Forms for Repeat Entries

When editing a node, there’s an option in the Data Entry Fields part to configure repeating items. Here are the details:

  1. Edit the node with the form you want to make repeating.
  2. In the Data Entry Fields area, click the Repeat Form option:

  3. Enter the maximum number of items to repeat (up to 50):

  4. Click Save Changes to save your work.

That’s all you need to do! The data variable names for your repeating forms will have an underscore and an item number at the end. So, in the example above, the variables for name and age will be name_1 and age_1,  name_2 and age_2, etc.

Thanks again to Tom K. for the great feature suggestion. While your trees can gather repeating items, great ideas like this need to be repeated only once to make it into the product.

So if you have a killer suggestion, please share!

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4 Steps to Creating a Scalable Customer Support Strategy

May 4, 2017 | Categories: Business, CRM, Customer Support | by Bill Zing

While you can choose to pool all of your energy into development or marketing to get your product/service alive and out into the world, you’ll only ever see some of that potential return. After all, what is a reliable product without a reliable company behind it?

Investing the time and resources into building a solid, scalable customer service strategy is necessary to creating a brand that’s both profitable and sustainable. According to a recent Customers 2020 report, experts predict that customer experience will soon surpass price and product as the key differentiator from one brand to another. In other words, how you handle customer service matters.

When Applian Technologies was working on improving their processes and becoming more streamlined, they performed a support audit of their channels and found a lot of inefficiencies. Their goal was to scale up as a startup, and their human labor intensive customer support strategy was holding them back. From our experience with Applian building customer experience, we came up with a few pointed steps to lead to a scalable support roadmap.

1. Find the Perfect Help Desk Platform

After performing a full-fledged audit of your customer service efforts, it’s time to adopt a help desk solution if you haven’t already. And, if you have, it might be a good time to refresh things or even look into new platforms if things aren’t scaling up as quickly as you’d hoped.

The right help desk solution will centralize your communications across email, chat and social media, and be easy to manage day-to-day. With a platform like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Desk.com, support teams can quickly identify repetitive issues, respond to customers and solve problems, and access key analytics to help optimize further along the way.

2. Offer Multi-Channel Customer Service

Offering multiple channels of access to support is the best way to keep customers happy 24/7; with the tools available today, it’s possible to provide consistent customer service without outsourcing live support or keeping agents up at all hours. The basic minimum multi-channel support platforms include:

  • Live chat support
  • Phone number
  • Helpdesk or CRM
  • Knowledgebase and FAQ
  • Interactive troubleshooters

While agents are offline, interactive knowledge bases, FAQs, and troubleshooters can offer customers access to many answers and solutions. Zingtree integrates with any CRM (like Zendesk and Desk), as well as live chat tools (like Zopim and Intercom) and publishing platforms (like WordPress), so you can strategically connect the dots with your customer service strategy, and help to streamline the entire process as you scale up.

In fact, when Applian technologies set up an interactive support system, they saw a 20% overall reduction in support cost and a huge reduction in the volume of back-and-forth support tickets overall.

3. Train Your Support Agents Early and Often

Onboarding new agents early and training (and re-training) them often is a hallmark of any company that truly understands how the knowledge of their employees can impact performance, satisfaction, and motivation. As customers are more empowered in their control of purchasing when, where and how they choose, so too should customer service agents be; training should always include a tutorial on how and when to go above and beyond for consumers.

Interactive training programs, much like interactive knowledge bases, are an ideal way to share information. With an online, standards-and-scenarios based training program, support staff can continue their company education in an easy-to-digest format, with complete information available on every facet of the business that they might need to know.

4. Keep up With (and Analyze) Reports

At the end of the day, the numbers and data surrounding your support strategy won’t lie. Set up your CRM tool to dole out automated reports based on the key statistics and indicators you need to keep track of, as well as for Twitter, Facebook, and any other platform you’re communicating with customers through. Aggregating and analyzing this data can help you to consistently improve as you scale up, identify any bottlenecks or trouble spots, and prove to the board that your strategy is really working.

Zingtree offers powerful analytics and reports to help make pulling data every month as simple as possible. Depending on how your interactive decision trees are set up, you can quickly see high-level usage stats, breakdowns by agent, overall traffic, and much more. Additionally, Zingtree works with Google Analytics to allow you to get even more robust and powerful tracking data.

How scalable is your current support strategy?

Start a new interactive decision tree to start streamlining, scaling up, and saving time and money. 

Any questions? We’re always here to help you get started. 

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Simple Software: How to Start a Training Program with Decision Trees

April 26, 2017 | Categories: Business, Training, Use Cases | by Bill Zing

People are what make businesses move, grow, and flourish; investing in your live human resources is always a smart decision. However critical to success, training programs don’t have to feel stuffy and laborious. A great training process shouldn’t feel like unwanted homework, it should inspire knowledgeable, motivated employees that are comfortable and confident.

Is your company using an effective training program? Are you training enough, and regularly? Outdated methods of a VHS tape and a conference room doesn’t count. These training statistics from Shift start to tell a tale of why an investment into employee training and engagement is so key:

  • Out of nearly 4,300 workers, 74% felt they weren’t achieving their full potential at work.
  • Companies with 100-500 employees only have 6 minutes of training every 6 months, on average.
  • 1 out of 3 employees said that uninspiring training content is actually a barrier to learning.
  • 7 out of 10 people said that training and learning opportunities influence their choice to stay with a company or leave.

Employee training programs, when executed well, can turn around the most effective, productive, and happy staff a business has ever seen. By setting up an interactive training program using online decision trees, you’ll provide a powerful platform for staff to learn from anywhere, and much more easily.

Guided Training Sessions

All businesses will typically have a training guide set in place; a long PDF or thick stack of bound papers to house the important items, manuals, and other key employee information. The problem with these long-form training guides? They’re time-consuming, mind-numbing, and never an accurate representation of the company’s brand or personality.

Interactive decision trees are a more friendly way to guide people through a training session by asking questions in an interview-style way, which helps to keep things moving quickly and keep employees more engaged with the important information being presented. You can even add customizations and visuals like GIFs, videos, and photos to help display step-by-step information and lead workers to a path of understanding.

Online Situational Simulations

Scenario-based documentation is in high-demand for many companies and organizations looking to train new hires in a standard and efficient way; different situational training always varies, for every type of industry. Whether your business is in retail, tech, healthcare, customer support, insurance, or even if you’re a governmental department or non-profit organization, your training simulations should be able to easily match your audience (employees).

Decision trees are a perfect digital resource for creating and implementing simulations online, for any kind of scenario that you may need to communicate in a training session. Providing interactive simulation tools to emulate different potential work scenarios can prove to be invaluable when leading trainees through new or complicated learning environments. Click here for an interactive example of a training simulation to see how it’s done.

Interactive Knowledge Base

Employees and customer-facing agents should be trained on every area of a businesses’ inner workings in order to provide the best work and the most helpful service. If staff were to ask questions to supervisors or other departments multiple times a day, a lot of bottlenecks and frustration would start to occur.

While customer-facing for our purposes, we host our own Zingtree FAQ on the Zingtree platform itself. We’ve found it’s a great way to organize based on different categories of information and quickly lead customers to the right answers to their questions. These knowledge base decision trees can be used in the same way for internal employees, offering a robust FAQ on everything from procedural standards to procurement processes.

Ready to improve your employee training and evaluation process? 

Get started with Zingtree!

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How to Create a Survey with Decision Trees

April 19, 2017 | Categories: Business, Use Cases | by Bill Zing

By nature, decision trees are powerful tools to showcase each “decision” along with its potential outcome. While already a recognized and respected way to create interactive guides, how-tos, and troubleshooters, decision trees are also a skillful platform for building, publishing and collecting survey data from both customers and internal employees.

Why Use Decision Trees for Surveys?

The general goal of a survey is to classify a population (who you are surveying) into complete sets, depending on their recorded responses. In this light, you can both represent the survey as a descriptive or analytical tool using a decision tree platform — it’s all narrowed down to the framing of the language used and in-depth paths created.

Better than common or commercial survey platforms, decision trees are ideal for creating these complex paths in a simple-to-follow format, so you never get lost during the building process. Additionally, decision trees make it easy to:

1. Build and implement surveys for recurring needs. 

Collecting information early and often is key when it comes to improving a business or organization. Decision trees are perfect for recurring surveys:

  • HR and internal surveys
  • NPS and customer satisfaction surveys
  • Market research surveys
  • Customer feedback surveys

For example, we use decision tree surveys for gathering information in a technical support request, and for when customers request demos. A little bit of background information goes a long way.

2. Include key information and helpful media. 

Depending on the survey at hand, it can be useful to embed documentation and/or visual media to help convey information better. Using visuals like photos, graphics, and GIFs, and adding relevant videos to your survey questions is a great way to communicate clear instructions and background information within little space.

3. Use logic to jump around complex paths.

Decision trees were built to simplify complex situations, including the complicated logic jumps and survey paths that can arise when collecting information. Our multiple survey building tools (shown below) make it easy to create and visualize the survey paths, end-results, and any missed connections within the logic itself. Plus, you can start building in a spreadsheet if that’s easier to wrap your head around initially.

4. Perform A/B testing and optimize results. 

To get the most from your survey, you’ll need to perform A/B testing on areas such as how your survey questions are written, the medium from which the surveys are sent, and how many questions are included. Using Zingtree Logic Nodes, you can easily A/B test surveys and determine which options are getting the most traction.

5. Customize with themes and branded CSS. 

Having a seamless look-and-feel with your own company or organization’s branding is important to how a survey is received by customers. Zingtree allows you to import your own custom CSS file to fit the design you want perfectly or choose from a selection of decision tree themes to mix and match color and style possibilities.

6. Embed surveys anywhere you need them.

Once you’ve created a survey using Zingtree, you can easily publish and distribute it through several ways. Have a web page or WordPress-hosted site you need a survey embedded on? You can do that. Need us to host a survey that you can quickly link your customers to? You can do that, too.

Getting Started: Building Your Survey

Creating a survey is easy with our toolkit, offering 3 easy-to-use options for creation.

The Wizard: The interface walks you through the decision tree building process while you provide the questions (and answers) that your end-users will see and navigate through.

The Designer: Draw out a decision tree on one screen, where you’ll be able to create the nodes and their connections to see exactly how the tree will flow.

Overview: A form-based option for creating one node at a time that consists of tools for refining your decision trees – perfect for content-heavy surveys.

Check out this real live decision tree example, showcasing a basic customer satisfaction survey template.

 

Zingtree makes it easy to build surveys, as well as question & answer style troubleshooters, scripts, sales filters and more to satisfy your customers, your agents and your business needs.

Contact us to learn more or get started today!

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Single Sign-On for Zingtree Decision Trees

April 4, 2017 | Categories: Business, How To, Integrations, Product Updates, Salesforce, Security, Zingtree News | by Bill Zing

security-blog

We’ve had several requests to incorporate Single Sign-on (SSO) into Zingtree, as a means of restricting access to trees.  Many customers have sensitive corporate processes or procedures encapsulated in their trees, and ensuring these trees are accessible only to certain employees can be invaluable.

Single Sign-on is a service provided by many vendors, including Okta, Microsoft (Active Directory / Azure), Google (G-Suite), Salesforce and more.  These services are known as Identity Providers.  A single log-in through an Identity Provider gives a user secure, authenticated access to applications provided by Service Providers like Zingtree.

Once you log in through your Identity Provider, you don’t need to re-enter your login credentials. SSO is a very convenient way to secure access to your applications, while not burdening end-users with extra hurdles.

Zingtree supports any service that is SAML 2.0 compliant, which is a common standard.

Set Up Overview

Configuring SSO requires your Identity Provider and Zingtree to share information with each other:

  1. Your Identity Provider needs information about Zingtree.
  2. Zingtree needs information about your Identity Provider.

SSO just needs to be set up once for your organization. Once you have Zingtree and your Identity Provider successfully working together, you can mark any of your trees as “SSO restricted” via the Settings tool to require a login to get access.

Configuring Zingtree for SSO

To start, in the Zingtree top menu, go to Account, Single-Sign-on. You’ll see the parameters (specific to your organization) to share with your Identity Provider:

Configure your Identity Provider with these parameters.

Next, click the blue button to Enter Identity Provider Data into Zingtree. The following screen appears:

Copy the rest of these settings from your Identity Provider.

If you’re ready to test, make sure Enable access restrictions on specified trees is checked.

Click Save Identity Provider Settings when finished.

Testing Your SSO Setup

Once you’ve set up your Identity Provider and Zingtree for SSO, you can test from Zingtree as follows:

  1. In Zingtree, go to Account, Single Sign-on.
  2. Click the orange Test Setup button at the lower right of the page.

From here. you can test logging into your Identity Provider from Zingtree.  If you’re already logged in, the test will just return your email or other identifier from your Identity Provider.  If you’re not yet logged in, the Identity Provider’s login screen will appear, and then you will be returned to the Zingtree SSO test page after logging in.

Enabling SSO on Your Trees

Once SSO is working properly from your test, you can restrict access to any tree as follows:

  1. Go to My Trees, and select the tree that you want to require SSO login.
  2. Click the Settings tool.
  3. Check Require Single Sign-on (SSO) Login to Access.
  4. Click Update Settings.

Release Notes

SSO has been tested with a variety of Identity Providers.  If you’re having trouble configuring with a specific service, please let us know!

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Avangate Startup Interview: Let’s Talk About Zingtree

March 13, 2017 | Categories: Business, Zingtree News | by Bill Zing

Recently, our fearless leader, Bill Dettering, sat down with Avangate to talk about the ins and outs of what makes Zingtree such an effective SaaS tool. Check out some of the highlights from the interview below, and check out the entire thing on the Avangate blog!

Q1: Please tell us a bit about Zingtree. When and how did the company get started?

Zingtree was first sprouted in late 2013 by Tom Mayes and myself, the founders of Applian Technologies. We were seeing a lot of inefficiency in supporting Applian’s software products, and as such the first Zingtree-like troubleshooters were hard coded into the support path. After seeing a big reduction in support emails, we knew we had a winner, and so Zingtree was started.

Seven months later, the embedded troubleshooter concept was turned into a toolkit that anyone could use. With lots of testing and feedback, the Visual Designer and Content tools came to life, reporting was added, and Zingtree was ready to branch out to real customers. Since releasing, we’ve had a lot of interest from companies operating Call Centers, so we’ve gradually built more live support options into the product.

Q2: Meeting a real business need you’ve experienced firsthand gives you a major advantage. 

What does Zingtree do differently from alternatives in the market?

Incredibly, there are very few alternatives in our space, especially when the need for a product like Zingtree is so obvious. Technically, we offer unique features like “subtrees,” which allow decision tree publishers to easily reuse content across multiple knowledge areas. Our customization options are advanced as well.

Our experience in operating a B2C company for 20 years gives us an advantage in making Zingtree – a B2B company – incredibly accessible – our site has numerous example trees, and a prospective customer can try all of the tools and use the trees without even having to sign up for an account. It’s interesting when we demo for large companies, and they ask about “training.” We chuckle and tell them this has never been necessary since Zingtree is designed to be easy to use.

Our pricing model is also unique, in that it’s built around “pay for what you use.” Our confidence in Zingtree is really high, so we can offer this sort of value proposition to our customers and keep a profitable business model.

Keep reading the interview right here >>

Ready to get started with your own decision tree? Sign up or log in here.

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