Category Archives: Product Updates

Updating Salesforce Cases from Decision Trees

October 21, 2018 | Categories: Integrations, Product Updates, Salesforce, Zingtree News | by Bill Zing

salesforce and zingtree

If you are launching Zingtree decision trees from within Salesforce, you have the ability to update the case record from any node of your tree. Here’s a summary of how to do it:

  1. Make sure your Agent Script button or link is set up according to this article.
  2. Add a Connected App to your Salesforce.
  3. Add the Salesforce Object Updater app to your organization within Zingtree.
  4. On any node in your tree, have the app trigger to update the case.
  5. Any Zingtree variables that begin with sf_ will update the corresponding field in Salesforce.

Adding a Connected App in Salesforce

To set up your Salesforce Connected App:

  1. Login into Salesforce and navigate to Setup, Create, Apps.
  2. Under Connected Apps, click New.
  3. Fill in the mandatory fields.
  4. Check the Enable OAuth Settings box.
  5. In the Callback URL field, enter this URL:
    https://zingtree.com/apps/salesforce/auth.php
  6. Under Available OAuth Scopes select:
    Perform requests on your behalf at any time (refresh_token, offline_access)
    Access your Basic Information (id, profile, email, address, phone)
  7. Your OAuth configuration should look like this when finished:

  8. Click Save and make a note of the generated Consumer Key and Consumer Secret. These need to be entered in the next step.

Adding the Salesforce Updater App

To add the App, do the following:

  1. Make sure you are logged into your Zingtree account.
  2. In Zingtree, go to Account, My Apps.
  3. Select the Salesforce Object Updater app.
  4. Enter your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret from the previous task.

    Click Continue.

  5. Allow access to your Salesforce account. (You may need to log into the account first.)

The Salesforce: Object Updater App will now appear in the list of Apps in My Apps.

Triggering a Salesforce Object Update

Once the App is installed in your organization, you can trigger a Salesforce update from any node in your tree.

  1. Edit the node in Zingtree where you want the update to occur. When this node is reached by an end user, the updater app will trigger.
  2. Under Apps/Webhooks, select your new app Salesforce: Object Updater.

     

  3. Click Save Changes.

 

Setting up Variable Names

As a part of your Zingtree session, you can collect data variables. Any variable that starts with sf_ will be used to update the corresponding field in Salesforce. For example, if you have a Salesforce field named description, a Zingtree variable named sf_description will be used to update that field.

Adding a Session Transcript

To include the Q&A history of the Zingtree session in a case field, you need to add a special field named Zingtree_Transcript to your Salesforce Cases.

In Salesforce:

  1. Go To Setup, Build, Customize, Cases, Fields.
  2. Scroll down to Case Custom Fields, and add a new field.
  3. The Data Type should be Text Area (Long). Click Next.
  4. The Field Name must be Zingtree_Transcript. Other parameters are your choice. See this example:


    Enter the other parameters, then click Next.

  5. Make the field read-only for all users, then click Next.
  6. Pick the Case Layouts where this information will be displayed, then click Save.

Troubleshooting

In case things aren’t working as you expect, here’s what to look out for:

  1. Changes to your case may not be reflected right away. Sometimes reloading the case (refreshing the page) will show the updates.
  2. If a Zingtree variable starting with sf_ has no field name counterpart in Salesforce, then the update will fail.
  3. You can check the Zingtree Event Log (Account, Event Log) to see all operations with Salesforce. This will show successes and failed updates, with error messages in case of failure.
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Create Freshdesk Tickets from Zingtree Decision Trees

October 6, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support, Freshdesk, How To, Product Updates | by Bill Zing

Does your company use Freshdesk to manage technical support?

If so, you can use Zingtree decision trees to reduce your technical support team’s workload. Customers can either self-solve their issue, or you can get a new ticket in your Freshdesk that includes all the information from their decision tree session. By effortlessly gathering background information from the customer via the decision tree, you save a lot of time by reducing back-and-forth messages.

Here’s how a ticket generated by Zingtree appears in Freshdesk:

Note how the ticket includes a transcript of the Zingtree session.

Click the button below if you’d like to try a demo tree that generates a ticket in our Freshdesk sandbox:

Setup Overview

It’s easy to set this up – here’s an overview of the process:

  1. Add a new Application to Zingtree for creating Freshdesk Tickets.
  2. Create a “Ticket Submitted” node.
  3. Create a “New Ticket” node to obtain the customer’s name, email, a ticket subject, a description, and optional custom fields.

Add a new Application to Zingtree for creating Freshdesk Tickets.

A Zingtree application can be called from any node. You’ll need to add the Freshdesk App first as follows:

  1. Log into your Zingtree account.
  2. Go to Account > My Apps.
  3. Select the Freshdesk: New Ticket App.
  4. Enter your Freshdesk API key and domain name. (Instructions are on the page.)

  5. Click Add Freshdesk App to save the new App.

Create a “Ticket Submitted” Node

When this node appears, a new ticket is added to your Freshdesk installation. This is the end result of pressing a “Submit Ticket” button inside the decision tree. You can create this node as follows:

  1. Go to Tools > Add Node.
  2. Add a new Content Node.
  3. Give the node a title, and any text you want to appear in the content area – like “Thanks for submitting a ticket” etc.
  4. Click the Apps/Webhooks tab.
  5. Click Add App/Webhook.
  6. Select the Freshdesk App you just created. You should see something like this:

  7. Click Save Changes to save this node.

Now we’re ready to link a ticket entry page to this “Ticket Submitted” node.

Create a “New Ticket” node

After your customer goes through the troubleshooting session, if they haven’t been able to resolve the issue, you can direct them to a node which collects the following info:

  • Name
  • Email
  • Subject for the Ticket
  • Description of the problem.

You use Zingtree’s Data Entry Fields to get this info. The field variables need to be named as follows:

name = fd_name
email = fd_email
subject = fd_subject
description = fd_description

  1. Edit the node where you want the customer to submit the ticket.
  2. Click the Data Entry Fields tab.
  3. Add fields for fd_name, fd_email, fd_subject, fd_description. When you are done, your Data Entry Fields will look something like this:

  4. You can also optionally add Custom Fields into the ticket. In the above example, we have a custom field named product in our Freshdesk installation. So the Zingtree equivalent is fd_cf_product.
  5. If you want to set the status and priority, you can also get variables named fd_status and fd_priority. This is optional.
  6. Click the Action Buttons tab, and add a “Submit” button to go to your submit ticket page.
  7. Save the changes to this node.

Summary

Examine this tree from the Demo Gallery to see a real live setup.

That’s how easy it is to create Freshdesk Tickets from Zingtree. Any questions, comments or suggestions for improvement? Talk to us!

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How to Send Email from Decision Trees

September 25, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support, How To, Integrations, Product Updates | by Bill Zing

send email from trees

One of the most frequent requests we get from customers is about sending email. We’ve spent a lot of time to make this process as simple as possible.

With Zingtree, you can use Email Nodes to send email in two ways:

  • Automatically, with no end-user interaction.
  • Showing a pre-defined form for the end-user to enter a message.

Emails can include everything you need:

  • The Session transcript.
  • Variables entered during the session.
  • Images and formatted text.
  • Attachments.

Sending  Emails Automatically

Emails can be sent automatically, with no end-user interaction. Start by creating an Email Node as follows:

  1. Click Tools, then Add Node.
  2. Select Email Node as the node type. The Send Method should be set to Send Automatically.
  3. The Email Node editor appears.
  4. Add a Page Title (mostly for your reference when using the Zingtree editing tools)
  5. In Send Email to, enter the delivery email address. You can enter multiple recipient email addresses separated by commas.
  6. Enter a subject and a message. The message can include images, formatted text, or placeholders for variables. For example, if you collect a variable called name, just add #name# into the email body for it to appear.
  7. Check Include Session Data in Email to include the Q&A transcript, and any data collected in the email. You can also check “Securely deliver session data via Link”, which will provide a link to the session information, instead of including it in the email body.
  8. In After Sending, choose a node to go to next. Or, choose Go to URL, and enter a URL to launch instead, like this:
  9. Click Save Changes when finished.

How to Create an Email Form Node

Your end-users can be presented with a stock email form, which looks like this:

You can make a node that displays this form by creating an Email Node as follows:

  1. Click Tools, then Add Node.
  2. Select Email Node as the node type. The Email Node editor appears.
  3. IMPORTANT: For the Send Method, select Show Form Before Sending.
  4. Add a Page Title (mostly for your reference when using the Zingtree editing tools)
  5. Add text for the Send Message button.
  6. In Send Email to, enter the delivery email address. You can enter multiple recipient email addresses separated by commas.
  7. You can enter a default subject or message. These are pre-filled in the email form.
  8. Check Include Session Data in Email to include the Q&A transcript, and any data collected in the email. You can also check “Securely deliver session data via Link”, which will provide a link to the session information, instead of including it in the email body.
  9. In After Sending, choose a node to go to next. Or, choose Go to URL, and enter a URL to launch instead, like this:
  10. Click Save Changes when finished.

Summary

These two methods are the recommended ways to send an email and should be used in place of any other methods.

As always, if you have any ideas to share with us on this or any other features, please let us know!

This article was originally published on June 15, 2018, and has been updated for accuracy. 

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Sending and Receiving Data from Decision Trees with Webhooks

September 20, 2018 | Categories: API, How To, Integrations, Product Updates | by Bill Zing

Our larger corporate clients have asked us for a way to be able to exchange Zingtree data with other applications. Some customers want to send data from a Zingtree session to another application or include data from another application in Zingtree.

Zingtree’s data exchange feature makes use of Webhooks with JSON formatted data. In fact, a lot of the tools we utilize work the same way.

Here’s an Example

To demonstrate how to send and receive data from your decision trees, we will walk through how to build a simple tree that asks for a USA zip code, and then shows the city and state for that zip code inside the tree.

Try this demo tree in the Zingtree Gallery here.

We will send data to a custom webhook we built, which takes a parameter of a zip code. It returns a JSON structure with the city and state info.  Here’s an example of the webhook in use:

http://zingtree.com/apps/webhook/filters/zippopotamus.php?zip=94960

If you click the link above, you’ll see these results:

{"zip":"94960","state":"California","state_abbreviation":"CA","city":"San Anselmo"}

The PHP source code for the webhook URL is here.

The variables #city#, #state# and #state_abbreviation# will now be usable by Zingtree. So to show the city, just enter #city# into the content area of any node.

Webhooks Process

Here’s a summary of how this works:

  1. Add the webhook to your organization’s apps.
  2. Include a call to the webhook in a node. When the node is visited, the call is executed.
  3. Any JSON variables returned by the call become Zingtree variables.

Adding the Webhook:

  1. Go to Account > My Apps.
  2. Click the Webhook button under My Apps.
  3. Enter a name for the webhook, and the URL as shown:The URL is: 
     http://zingtree.com/apps/webhook/filters/zippopotamus.php?zip=#zip#

    #zip# will receive the zip code variable entered by the end-user.

  4. Click Add Webhook. This makes the hook available to your trees.

Calling the Webhook when a node is visited:

  1. Go to Overview, and edit the node you want to trigger the webhook call.
  2. Under Send Message To, select Webhook: Zip Lookup.

Universal Parameters

Every call to the webhook URL you provide always includes the following parameters:

  • node_id
  • session_id

Adding Security/Authorization

You can add an extra layer of security to your webhooks by passing an authorization token into the URL that launches your tree. The token is passed back to the webhook URL in the HTTP header.

To send the authorization token MYTOKEN, add this to the URL that launches the tree:

&auth_token=MYTOKEN

To check the token in your webhook, look at the X-Auth-Token value in the HTTP header.

Please note: The auth_token remains the same for the entire tree session.

Credits

The demo uses the free zippopotam.us postal code lookup service.

Any questions? We’re here to help – please reach out at any time via the feedback page or the orange chat window at the bottom right of our homepage.

This article was originally published on April 28, 2016, and has been updated for accuracy. 

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Zingtree Updates: September 2018 – Labor of Love

September 3, 2018 | Categories: Product Updates, Zingtree News | by Bill Zing

Just in time for Labor Day, here’s what’s been happening at the Zingtree labs this summer! With a new Task Manager, PDF capability for Document Nodes, renumber and merge trees, and some more notification options are the highlights, we’re really excited about the progress we’ve made over the last several weeks.

See all of our improvements since June 2018 below:

New Features

  • Task Manager tool: Business Process Management, using Zingtree decision trees.
  • Renumbering nodes: You can now renumber nodes using the new option in the Copy Tree tool.
  • Combine trees: Make two trees into one using the new Merge Trees tool.
  • PDF generation: Document Nodes can now create PDF files.
  • History and Breadcrumbs: Embedded trees now have URL switches for embed_history or embed_breadcrumbs (various).
  • Push Live update flag: For trees with Push Live, DEV trees with updates since last push live now show with a red icon in My Trees (thx Lasse).
  • Event Log: See failed emails, login attempts and more from Account > Event Log.
  • Simple SMS, email & Slack notifications: From new built-in Apps under Account > My Apps.
  • Multiple apps: You can now have several apps/webhooks on a single node.
  • Better receipts: Customer receipts now have a PDF download option.
  • Erase variables: There’s now a Zingtree Erase Variables stock webhook (for Pharoah).

Updates and Minor Improvements

  • Agent feedback comments on a LIVE tree now always go to DEV version of the tree (Ian M.).
  • Preview now includes a feedback button (customer request).
  • “Lookup credits” are now “Enhanced Usage” credits.
  • Now shows “please wait” when loading traffic map (button clicks) report.
  • Added “please wait” message to long tree loads.
  • CSS templates now display white text in HTML <btn> tags (used in adding buttons to node contents).
  • Preview tool shows back, restart button options.
  • Added hint for webhook calls in the node editor.
  • Uploads now go to uploads.zingtree.com instead of zingtree-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com.
  • Doesn’t show “back” or “restart” on the starting node (Various customers requested this).
  • Right-to-left (Hebrew) display for History bar looks better (for Tal).
  • New WordPress plug-in 5.0 supports history, breadcrumbs.
  • Reorganized My Apps page.
  • Node labels in button choices in content node editor now use node titles (if available).
  • Session Details report cleaned up.
  • “Unknown” result label changed to “In Progress.”
  • Drawing return-to links from tree nodes now supported in Designer.
  • Content Node editor loads faster (thx Oliver).
  • Multi-tree API calls sped up.
  • Link control in the editor and new link nodes now defaults to “new tab” (Jonathan B.).
  • Content editor no longer shows link option for Google, Facebook, Froala.
  • Content editor links now have a tooltip option.

Fixes

  • Linking from LIVE to DEV tree now shows proper tree ID of DEV tree in session data.
  • PNG export looks for invalid characters that can break it.
  • PNG export is better at framing the content of the tree in the PNG.
  • Copied trees now show current date and time for “last opened” – appears at top of the list in My Trees.
  • Adding new merge variables in a pause and resume scenario now works consistently (Lasse).
  • SSO author login errors no longer stay stuck unable to log in.
  • Empty checkbox score no longer crashes form field data update (Jay H.)
  • Double-quoted strings now work OK in Logic Node editor, Designer for Logic Nodes.
  • Single quotes no long make Zapier transfers fail (Alok).
  • Now says “new logic node” instead of “new scoring node” in an alert message when creating a new logic node.
  • Doc node Continuation buttons now use theme.
  • Searching linked trees used the wrong search when a fade transition was in effect.
  • MailChimp API calls changed to always use a secure connection – now works properly again (Jonathan T.).
  • Form field labels in the content editor no longer show HTML codes instead of single quotes (Kwame A.).
  • Document node continuation button editor now shows email nodes correctly.
  • Breadcrumbs and history restore to the same state when pause & resume is triggered after a ##treetag-any## or ##treetag-all## link is clicked (Tal).
  • Custom CSS generator now ensures variables have values – won’t show error messages.
  • Layout for Snapshots tool now better for action buttons on one line.
  • Now allows multiple simultaneous people to use Agent Portal or Task Manager demos.
  • Centering videos now works properly.
  • Task manager login page no longer redirects to agent login page if the session is no longer valid.
  • Session click history output when included in a node now also includes blank questions in the click path – substituting page titles instead (Tatiana).
  • User-only text now hidden in subtrees when in agent mode (Kelly S.).
  • Thumbnails overview now shows “auto-send” for auto-send email nodes.
  • Sending email when the main tree was pushed LIVE and subtree was DEV now works as expected (Rachel D.).
  • Fixed bug with Tree tag links not working after restart.
  • Tree-node node selector now shows updated labels.
  • Rendering engine faster for large trees with many variables (Lee S.).
  • Shows stock apps in Settings/Code selector.
  • Inviting authors always allows people to continue signup.
  • Auto-send from email nodes no longer logs click text from the previous click.
  • Email input form now displays wider on small devices (Christiaan).
  • Edit, Copy buttons for auto-email nodes in Thumbnails overview now works as expected (Ian M.).
  • Tree rendering now handles improper UTF-8 characters (Thai).
  • DEV trees no longer show in Agent Portal search results (Angie H.).
  • CSV import now handles UTF-8 characters properly (Emma V.).
  • API speed updates for find_agent_sessions, find_tree_sessions.
  • Editing code in pop-up Content Node editor now highlights properly (Matthieu).
  • Empty webhook return no longer causes JS error.
  • Tags now allow Hebrew characters (Tal).
  • Now replaces #session# in email node templates for auto-send (Lasse).
  • Phone number validation no longer fails if there’s a space inside the phone number.
  • Retina display of screenshots now works properly in Wizard, Designer tutorials.
  • New email form nodes now include session data.
  • Email form node shows default text if no continuation text specified (for Legacy forms).
  • Email form nodes properly show “please wait” when Send is clicked.

That’s it! Keep an eye on all of our product updates, and feel free to reach out with any questions, anytime. 

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Generating Custom Documents Using Document Nodes

August 19, 2018 | Categories: Customer Support, How To, Product Updates | by Bill Zing

Updated August 19, 2018, with PDF Generation option.

We’ve had several requests to create a final, single page document based upon answers to decision tree questions. Zingtree’s Document Nodes makes this powerful document generation capability a reality.

With the help of Document Nodes, you can now complete tasks like:

  • Making custom sales brochures.
  • Building legal agreements.
  • Generating purchase orders.
  • Creating evaluations and assessments.

For a simple example, examine the What Computing Device Do I Need? decision tree from the Zingtree Gallery.

You can also provide PDF files as a download option, or as a link to include in an email.

This companion video illustrates how document nodes work, and how to create and edit them:

Document Nodes Overview

Document Nodes display the content from one or more content nodes on a single page, based upon variables and values. Variables can be from one of these sources:

  • Data Entry field values.
  • Scoring variables from button clicks.
  • Variables set from Data Entry field list boxes or radio buttons.
  • Variables introduced from calls to Webhooks.
  • Merge Variables passed into the session.

Here’s how it looks in the Document Node editor:

Building a Tree to Generate a Document

To build a decision tree that generates a document based on answers selected, we recommend these steps:

  1. Create your question nodes, and assign Button Click Variables to important responses.
  2. Create content nodes (with no button options) for all of the possible snippets of content you’ll want to show in the final document.
  3. Create a document node that pulls everything together.

Set Up: How to Create a Document Node

Here’s how to create a fully-functional Document Node, step-by-step:

  1. From Overview, click Add Node.
  2. Select New Document Node.
  3. Add the pieces of content you want to serve to your end-users.

Each piece of content is set up like the image shown below. In this example, if the variable phone_calls equals “Yes”, we add the contents of node #6 to the final document.

Using the Document Node Editor

Drag this to reorder the content:

Click this to delete the content from the document node:

Pick a variable to test:

Pick an operation:

Pick a value to test against:

Edit the contents of the included node:

Show the contents of the included node:

Try the Document Node editor with a demo page here.

Hint: Once the content a node is inserted in the document, it won’t be re-inserted again.

Continuing On After Creating a Document

You can add a “Next” button to the bottom of the document node, and have the end-user continue on to another node after viewing the generated document. Just configure your document node like you see here:

Debugging Tip

Use a node that shows your variables while you are testing. The What Computing Devices do I Need example tree uses Node #10 as an ending piece in the Document Node so you can see the value of all of your variables.

Making PDF Versions Available

You can provide PDF versions of a generated document in two ways:

  • As a “Download PDF” button when the document node appears.
  • As a document URL, uploaded to the Zingtree servers.

Please note that any PDF file generated is charged to you at $0.01 USD per 500 Kb.

Download PDF button option

Here’s how a document node can appear with a “Download PDF” button:

This can be configured in the Document Node editor like this:


PDF URL option

The other option is to have Zingtree generate a PDF file, upload it to a server, and create a link to the PDF as a Zingtree variable. Here’s how that’s set up in the Document Node editor:

You need to do these three steps:

  1. Select Generate PDF File and Continue.
  2. Enter a PDF URL variable. This variable will contain the URL for your PDF file.
  3. Select a node to go to once the PDF has been generated.

In the above example, the variable pdf_url will contain the URL of the PDF file generated by this document node. See this article to learn how to make links in emails or content nodes to a PDF document URL.

Note that in this setup, the end-user will not see their document node until they open the PDF URL.

PDF hint: Pagination

If you want to force a page break, add ##PDF Page## anywhere in the content area of a node.

Live Example

The What Computing Devices do I Need tree demonstrates a simple tree with a Document Node at the end.  This tree helps an end-user decide whether they need a phone, tablet or desktop PC, based on the answers to some questions.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions on this feature? Talk to us on live chat or by email!

This article was originally published on November 29, 2016, and updated on August 19, 2018.

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Decision Trees that Send Notifications via Text Message, Email or Slack

August 14, 2018 | Categories: Business Process Management, How To, Product Updates | by Tiffany

notifications from zingtree

A lot of business processes can be enhanced by sending notifications to people when certain stages are reached. For example, the Zingtree Task Manager makes it easy to notify key stakeholders when a process reaches a certain point, and if they need to act upon it. Notifications are simple messages that can be triggered from any node in your decision tree.

You have these options:

  • Text Messages: You’ll receive a simple SMS message to your mobile phone.
  • Emails: A simple, text email message.
  • Slack: Send a message to any of your Slack channels.

Notifications can be sent to one or more people and can include variables gathered during your Zingtree session.

How to Add Notifications

Text messages, Emails, and Slack Notifications are available via Account > My Apps:

Here’s how to add a notification:

  1. From Account, My Apps, pick from Slack, Text Message or Email notification.
  2. Add information about the notification. Text messages notifications look like this:Email notifications like this:Slack notifications let you select a channel to post to, like this:

    Once you’ve added a notification to your organization, you can attach it to any node.

  3. Edit the node where you want to send the notification from.
  4. Click the Apps/Webhooks tab, and then Add App/Webhook.

  5. Pick the notification you added previously, and enter the message to send. In this example, we’ll choose a Slack notification, and send a message about a new blog post.

    Notice that the message above contains a variable #task_name#. You can include any variables from the Zingtree session in notification messages.

  6. Click Save Changes when done.

You can add several notifications to a node; so, for example, you could send a text message and an email all at once.

Do you have a cool application for using notifications? Please share, or contact us if you have questions or suggestions.

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Showing Context in Decision Trees: History and Breadcrumbs

August 8, 2018 | Categories: Call Centers, Customization, How To, Product Updates | by Bill Zing

NL-header-updates3

Update August 2018: You can now include History or Breadcrumbs in embedded trees.

When using a Zingtree, have you ever thought how nice it would be to see some more context of where you are in the tree? Or the steps it took to get to where you are? Come and discover Zingtree’s two contextual publishing options: History and Breadcrumbs.

History allows you to see every step you took while using the tree:

Breadcrumbs show the sequence of node titles that appeared throughout your journey through the tree:

With both options, you can click on a link and travel back to any previous node in your journey. Visit the Zingtree Gallery and see for yourself what your end-users will experience.

How to Add History or Breadcrumbs

The Publishing Links tool makes it easy to add History or Breadcrumbs to your published trees. This works for both Hosted and Embedded trees.

  1. Go to the Publishing Links tool.
  2. Click Advanced Hosting Options underneath Hosted or Embedded.
  3. Select Show History or Show Breadcrumbs from the Path Options:

  4. Use the URL or embed code provided to add the option to your published tree.

Advanced Stuff: Modifying URLs Directly

You can also modify the URL for your published trees to add history or breadcrumbs.

For hosted trees:

  • Add &show_history=1 or &show_breadcrumbs=1 to the URL for the tree.

For embedded trees:

  • Add &embed_history=1 or &embed_breadcrumbs=1 to the iFrame URL.


Enjoy your history and breadcrumbs, and let us know what you think!

This article was originally published on October 23, 2015, and has been updated to reflect recent updates. 

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Decision Trees for Business Processes – The Zingtree Task Manager Tool

August 2, 2018 | Categories: Business, Business Process Management, Product Updates, Zingtree News | by Bill Zing

Business Process Management with Zingtree

Overview

One of the more common, interesting uses for interactive decision trees is as an online task management tool for streamlining recurring business processes. These are standardized workflows that have a series of repeatable steps, which may need to involve handoffs to different people on a team or even in another department. For example, your company may have an approval process for:

  • making purchases
  • approving project budgets
  • hiring or firing employees
  • creating blog posts (like this one!)
  • and any other repetitive tasks or processes your business uses

The Zingtree Task Manager is a dashboard for guiding your coworkers through decision-tree-based processes created using the Zingtree tools.  This makes it easy for everyone to be held accountable, and to follow standard operating procedures.

Here’s a diagram of a simple purchasing process:

In this case, if the item is under $100, then the request is approved automatically. Otherwise, a manager needs to approve the order.

Set Up

Creating your first business process with interactive decision trees is not complicated. It involves these steps:

  1. Enter your “agents” – the people who act upon your processes – and assign them to groups.
  2. Create a decision tree, and assign each node (step of the process) to one of your Agent Groups.
  3. Assign your tree(s) to various Agent Groups. Only people in those groups will be allowed to start or kill a project.

This article has full details on how to set up your first business process.

The Task Manager

The Zingtree Task Manager was built with full-team functionality in mind. Anyone involved in a work process can use standardized decision tree workflows to navigate through the procedure. Certain steps can only be completed by specific people, and once you reach a step where it’s no longer your responsibility, that task is assigned to someone else.

This article has a video and full reference for the Zingtree Task Manager.

For example, in the procurement process diagrammed above, an employee creates the purchase request and a manager approves or declines it if over $100.

Here’s how the Task Manager could appear for an individual:

When someone Takes or Resumes a task, it looks like this:

Groups

Each person involved in a process (an “agent”) can belong to one or more groups. You can configure people and groups via Account > My Agents. So for example, a small team with two employees and one manager is set up like this:

Note that “Bill Zing” belongs to both the manager and employee groups.

When creating your process trees, you can tag each tree with the groups that are allowed to start the process.

Assigning Steps in the Process using Tags

Each node of your business process tree needs to include the Agent Group(s) allowed to act on that step of the process. You can see how our procurement process tree’s groups (outlined in red) are set up here:

 

The initial request step (node #1) is tagged with “employee”, so only people in the employee group can initiate a request. Node #6 – the Manager approval step – is tagged as “manager”, so only a manager can approve the purchase.

Assigning Agent Groups to a node is done using the Groups tab when editing a node. Here’s how node #1 is set up for an employee group:

 

Project Status: Success, Failure or In-Progress

At the end of a workflow, a project is either successful or a failure. When building your process tree, you can assign a result to each node in the node editor – like this:

Once a node is reached with a success or failure result, the process has ended.

Notifications

A notification can be sent when any node (process step) is reached so that the next person can be alerted and step in for their task. Notifications can be sent in a few different ways, including:

  • A text message
  • A simple email notification
  • A Slack notification
  • A customized email (using an email node)

Task Manager Operations

Your agents – people involved in your processes – can perform the following operations on each task:

  • Start: Begin a new task, and assign it a name.
  • Take: Take over the next step of a task. Only one person at a time can move a task to the next step.
  • Release: Release a task so another person can complete the step.
  • Resume: Continue with a task that you have previously taken.
  • Revisit: Go back to a previous step in the task you have permissions to act upon.
  • Reclaim: Take back a task from someone who has taken it.
  • Kill: End a task early, without following all the steps to completion.

Go here for a full reference on the Task Manager


Got questions about using Zingtree for streamlining your repetitive business processes? Reach out to our team!

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