Zingtree is an ultra-reliable tool and we believe that the transparency to view the real-time status of your decision trees is incredibly important.

With our new System Status page, you can quickly access a running report of Zingtree’s server availability, including a real-time breakdown of uptime percentage, downtime in minutes and seconds, number of downs, and a digestible downtime summary. To locate this page, just select “More” from the Zingtree website menu, then “System Status.”

We use a dependable, scalable architecture built on Amazon Hosting, so no matter how much traffic we receive, we can always launch extra servers to keep things running smoothly for your hosted trees. In the rare case of temporary shutdown or maintenance, we will always be sure to let you know in advance.

To learn more, check out our FAQ, or contact our Tech Support team.

Beyond troubleshooting and support, Zingtree makes a handy interactive front-end for getting people to the right page on your website. We consistently see our customers building trees for sales prospecting, medical appointments, loan qualification, hiring, and other situations or environments where a little bit of automated filtering goes a long way to save valuable time. Plus, Zingtrees are a great means for information gathering, too.

We also get requests for integrating Zingtree within various back-end platforms – most notably, CRM. Often, when a customer’s data gets imported into another system, you’ll want the Q&A transcript of their Zingtree session attached.

We’ve created a Simple Sales Funnel demo tree and a basic back-end script in the Zingtree Gallery so you can see a working example.

• Examine the script here.
• Run the tree here.

Here’s how to pass a Zingtree Q&A transcript along to ANY system:

1. From your tree, create a link node to your contact form (i.e. contact_form.php), with a URL like this:

contact_form.php?session_id=#session#

2. In contact_form.php, add this JavaScript right above the ending </body> tag:

<script id="zingtree_field_id"
value="session_data"
src="//zingtree.com/api/add-session-data-to-form.js">
</script>

3. In the form itself, add a hidden field with an id of “session_data”. The name can be whatever you like. Example:

<input id="session_data" name="zingtree_stuff" type="hidden" value="" />

That’s it!

Under the hood: When the form is loaded, the add-session-data-to-form.js script reads the session_id parameter, then loads the session transcript into the hidden field with the id=”session_data”.

BONUS:

Rather than having a field that must have an id of “session_data”, you can also specify the ID of the field that you want to insert Zingtree data into. This is especially helpful for Salesforce or other CRM apps that generate forms for you.

For example, if you added a multi-line text field to your CRM system form with an ID of “my_data_field”, you could use this piece of code instead:

<script
id="zingtree_field_id"
value="my_data_field"
src="//zingtree.com/api/add-session-data-to-form.js">
</script>

No matter the reasons why a customer chooses to reach out to you, it’s important that each agent is professional, knowledgeable, courteous, and can offer expedited assistance. Training targeted specifically to areas of competency, efficiency and customer service best practices are all requirements to delivering excellent customer care.  

Training alone is not enough to account for consistent customer service delivery, though; the software that customer facing agents rely on is equally important. The technology surrounding CRM platforms is evolving and nowadays it is easier to stay nimble thanks to cloud technology. Another big change in software is the analytic capabilities that allow companies to incorporate some pretty nifty features such as customized scripts (like Zingtree!) and persistent ticket tracking, which allow for better customer experiences.

Let’s review a few training tips to take your customer service from good to awesome.

Use Your Knowledge

Customers are coming to you with a lot of product awareness, but they still expect your representative to be the expert. Customer facing agents should be trained thoroughly on all of the products and services they are responsible for representing, in addition to knowing where to quickly send a customer if s/he requires help or service from another department. Beyond product knowledge, training should be comprehensive regarding the software/hardware platforms the agent is working with.

Always Be Professional

Training customer facing agents how to handle frustrated and irate customers is key for employee morale and low turnover. If agents aren’t fully and properly trained in working with upset customers, you can plan on a revolving door in your contact center. Customer facing agents who can remain professional, even when tested, will reflect well on your company. Training agents to remain professional whenever they’re representing your company should be ongoing – there is always room for improvement!

Remain Courteous

The push and pull of a profitable company call center requires agents to efficiently resolve a customer’s issue, while also remaining polite and courteous. Training agents in how to be polite and productive is a practiced skill. As more customers demand personalized care, agent training that teaches manners and personalization techniques will be rewarded with customer loyalty.

Have Departmental Knowledge

Before an agent is allowed to work with customers, he or she needs to be broadly aware of the functions and roles of the other customer-serving departments. The next step is to ensure proper training in how to patch a customer through to the right person; this is where the need for an omni-channel strategy comes in. It’s easy to see how frustrating it can be for customers to start with one agent, then get transferred to another while having to start over at the beginning if your software doesn’t track a customer through different channels or departments.

As with all training programs, it should be relevant, easy to absorb, and appropriate to the learner. Making training tools available for various types of learners is important if what is being taught is to be incorporated into the workplace.

Customer facing agents are under a lot of stress and pressure but a good training program that is ongoing pays off in that employees are more satisfied in their jobs, which ultimately translates to more satisfied customers!  

This article was written by Jodi Beuder of MHI Global. Are you interested in submitting a guest blog post? Please contact us!

Here’s an example of how Zingtree’s intelligent, interactive decision trees are helping to advance customer service flows and resolutions in an innovative tech company.

YouMail, the leading provider of visual voicemail, realized that they were in need of a smart automated troubleshooter to resolve support inquiries quickly, with the same speed and power that their own service provides.

By using a combination of Zingtree’s customer support decision trees based on YouMail’s knowledge base data and their own support agents, YouMail was able to provide even faster assistance to their customers across a wide range of questions, become more efficient in providing answers, and save money.

You can see the case study below, and view a PDF version here.

Want to see more? Explore the Zingtree Gallery for examples of how our decision trees and interactive solutions provide value for businesses!

As we are making Zingtree more connected to the rest of the world, our valued customers have been asking us how to import the results of a Zingtree session into Salesforce.

With just a little JavaScript magic, you can now add Zingtree data invisibly into your custom “Create Lead” forms.

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Create a new custom field in Salesforce. It should be a “Text Area Long” – we like to call it “Zingtree Session Data,” but you can call it whatever you like.

• In your “new case” form, make sure this field is a part of the data entered in the “new case” form.

• Go to Setup, and search for “Web-to-case.” Generate the HTML, and note the id= value of the Zingtree Session Data field in the form.

• At the bottom of the page that contains the form, just above the </body> tag, add this line of code, substituting the id of the form field which will receive the Zingtree data for “######” :

<script
id="zingtree_field_id"
value="######"
src="http://zingtree.com/api/add-session-data-to-form.js">
</script>

• When loading this form from a Zingtree URL Link Node, make sure to add this code to the URL which opens the form:

?session_id=#session#

This setup will load the Zingtree session data into the field you designated for Zingtree data, and then hide the field so it’s not seen by your end-users.

You can see an example page that contains a crude Salesforce form here. When you view the source, you’ll see a text area field with id=”00N61000006Bdlq“, and this code at the bottom of the page:

<script
id="zingtree_field_id"
value="00N61000006Bdlq"
src="http://zingtree.com/api/add-session-data-to-form.js">
</script>

Any more questions? View more of our Zingtree How-To’s on the blog, or contact our support staff. 

Freshdesk is one of our most popular integration requests, so we’ve taken some extra time to make it easy to import Zingtree session transcripts into a Freshdesk ticket. Support staff can now see all of the steps a customer went through in a decision tree before needing to ask for help – it’s a huge time-saver for agents!

When the integration is set up, agents will see a Zingtree transcript with each ticket, like this:

Overview:

You’ll first need Freshdesk Admin privileges to complete the process. This method will create a new field called Zingtree Session Data; it gets hidden from the customer, but it appears for the agent answering the ticket. It includes the entire Q&A transcript of the user’s Zingtree session prior to opening a new ticket in Freshdesk.

Here’s how to set up the Freshdesk side:

1. In Freshdesk, go to your Admin panel, and select Ticket Fields.
2. Create a new “Multi Line Text”  ticket field named Zingtree Session Data. The properties will look like this:
3. Click Done.
4. Click Save to add the field.
5. Next go to Admin, Portals, and click  Customize Portal next to the portal that will receive Zingtree data.
6. Go to Layout and Pages, Portal Pages.
7. Click New Ticket, then add this code to the new ticket edit area:

   <script src="//zingtree.com/api/freshdesk-new-ticket.js"></script>

   This is what it looks like (new code outlined in red):

8. Click Save and Publish.

On the Zingtree side:

You see to make Link Nodes that go to your FreshDesk New Ticket form, and add ?session_id=#session# to the end of the URL. Example:

If this is the link to your ticket form:
http://support.mycompany.com/support/tickets/new

Use this URL within a Zingtree Link Node to go to the ticket form, and have the Zingtree session transcript transferred:

http://support.mycompany.com/support/tickets/new?session_id=#session#

We’ve set up a sample Gallery tree (“Freshdesk Integration example”) for you to examine here. You can copy this tree, and then change the URL link to point to your own Freshdesk domain.

That’s it! Follow these steps and in 15 minutes you’ll have an awesome marriage of Freshdesk with your Zingtrees.

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? With our latest update, you can do both! Come discover Zingtree’s two new tree publishing options: History and Breadcrumbs.

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

Breadcrumbs shows 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.

Publishing enhancements: To make these features easier to use, we’ve simplified our Publish page so that a single click takes you to an Advanced Hosting Options playground. Here, you can experiment with different settings to see how your tree will look and behave. When it’s just right, your hosting URL will be displayed for a simple copy and paste.

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

Please note: For now, History is available only for Zingtree-hosted trees and the Agent Portal.  Breadcrumbs are for Zingtree-hosted trees only.

If you run a Call Center or do live support, and you use Salesforce, being able to link a Zingtree script or troubleshooter to each case is really handy.  Not only does this give agents a guide to follow when helping customers, but if a case is transferred or reopened, the last viewed node in the Zingtree reappears, and the entire history of the session is available as well.

Inside of Salesforce, we’ll create an “Agent Script” button, accessible from each case. Clicking this button will open an Agent Script, built with Zingtree:

Here’s how to set up Salesforce with an embedded Zingtree:

1. Go to Salesforce.com, and log in to your account.
2. Click Setup on the top right of the screen.
3. Select Build > Customize > Cases > Buttons, Links and Actions in the left panel.
4. Click New Button or Link.
5. We’ll modify the New Button form to look like this:
6. Make the Label “Agent Script”.
7. Make the Name “Agent_Script”. (The name cannot have space characters, so we use an underscore here.)
8. Select Detail Page Button.
9. The Behavior is Display in New Window.
10. The Content Source is URL.
11. For the URL, make it look like this (substituting the tree ID of your script for #########):

    http://zingtree.com/host.php?tree_id=#########&style=panels&show_history=1&persist_names=Restart&persist_node_ids=1&nopermalink=1&source={!Case.OwnerEmail}&session_id=#########-{!Case.CaseNumber}

12. Click Save.
13. Next, we have to add the custom button to the Case page layout. Within Setup, go to Build, Customize, Cases, Page Layout.
14. Click Buttons.
15. Drag the Agent Script button into the custom buttons area, like this:
16. Click Save.

Now, when your agents are in a case, they can click the Agent Script button, and walk through your Zingtree troubleshooter with the customer. Awesome!

Customization Notes: You can use the Zingtree Advanced Hosting Options to customize the display of your tree within Salesforce by modifying the URL. Once you’re done, take the hosting URL, and add the following to it (substituting your tree ID for #########):

&source={!Case.OwnerEmail}&session_id=#########-{!Case.CaseNumber}

If you’re running a call center, or doing live support via Freshdesk, you can have a Zingtree script ready for your agents to follow to help problem-solve with a customer on the line. Better still, the script is linked to the ticket, so if another agent takes over the support session, they can see the steps the previous agent took, and start at the same node where the previous agent left off.

Freshdesk makes it easy to link Zingtree scripts into your ticket pages using their FreshPlugs. Our implementation adds an “Agent Script” button to the right hand panel of the ticket page. Clicking this button opens a Zingtree script in a new tab, tied to the current ticket.

Here’s how it looks in Freshdesk:

Here’s how to set up Freshdesk with Zingtree scripts:

1. Log into Freshdesk, and go to Admin, Integrations in your support portal.
2. Click on the FreshPlugs tab and choose New FreshPlug.
3. Give your FreshPlug a name and description.
4. Copy paste the code below into the script section. Substitute ######### with the ID of the tree you want to use for your script (this appears twice!):

   <a class="btn btn-success" target="_blank" href="http://zingtree.com/host.php?tree_id=#########&style=panels&show_history=1&persist_names=Restart&persist_node_ids=1&nopermalink=1&session_id=#########-{{ticket.id}}"><b>Agent Script</b></a>

5. Click Save when finished.

More customization: You can use the Zingtree Advanced Hosting Options to create a custom URL to tailor how the tree will appear.   To use it in your FreshPlug, just add this code to the end of the URL (again substituting ######### with your tree ID):

&session_id=#########-{{ticket.id}}

Update: The Zingtree Freshdesk Agent Scripting for Call Centers plugin is also available in the FreshPlugs Gallery.

Version 2.1 of the Zingtree WordPress plug-in is now available! This version uses the latest Zingtree rendering engine, and also supports two new parameters:

hide_title: Hides the name of the tree.

hide_back_button: Removes the Back button from the embedded tree.

Here’s an example:

[zingtree id="773607093" style="panels" hide_title="yes" hide_back_button="yes"]

Download the latest plug-in here.

Here’s an actual embedded tree, using the Zingtree plug-in and the new shortcode parameters.

Live chat is a great communication channel, and the preferred choice for many customers when engaging with a company; some of the appeal has to do with its ease, simplicity and brevity. When agents are appropriately trained in live chat etiquette, and have access to efficient scripting tools, they are much more likely to have a successful interaction with a customer.

In a paper published by TELUS International, the company asserts that avoiding customer frustration and brand damage should be top of mind for companies when training live chat agents. Often, customers choose live chat because it’s easy and quick; if your live chat interactions are forcing customers to put forth a lot of effort in their engagement, then your company isn’t realizing the full potential of this communication channel.

To bolster its argument for minimizing customer effort, the report cited a 2010 Harvard Business Review article where the case was made that “delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty; reducing their effort—the work they must do to get their problem solved—does.”

So, how do live chat agents reduce the customer’s effort when choosing this communication channel?

1. Keep It Brief

Reducing customer effort begins with your agent’s greeting. The greeting sets the tone of the conversation, so if it’s long-winded or muddled, your agent is placing undue burden on the customer. Once the conversation has commenced, keeping responses to the point is key to providing a positive customer experience. As mentioned earlier, being brief doesn’t mean being clipped. The goal is to provide enough information to the customer in an efficient, yet courteous, manner.

Keeping it brief is especially important when working with a frustrated customer. A simple “I’m sorry” has more impact than a convoluted, over-worded apology.

2. Make Sure It’s Concise

Concise wording will lessen the chances of misunderstanding, and providing clear answers reduces the customers’ effort. Remember that customers prefer live chat because it’s efficient, so training agents how to properly write out responses that quickly get to the heart of the issue, and using proper and robust Live Agent Scripting, are key components of efficiency.

3. Read First, Then Respond

One common problem identified by TELUS is that agents will provide quick answers without first taking the time to read or fully understand what the customer is asking – this is an efficiency killer. Whatever the reason, agents need to take the time to read what the customer has written and then respond with an answer that provides a quick solution.

Once the issue or question that the customer is getting at is identified, the agent can then provide a brief, yet concise, response that moves the conversation forward without requiring the customer to put forth much effort. This is made even simpler when using powerful scripting tools that can help the agent to stay on track and keep the engagement flowing smoothly.

This article was written by Jodi Beuder of MHI Global. Are you interested in submitting a guest blog post? Please contact us!

The most chaotic season of the year is quickly approaching, and it’s more important than ever to prepare your call center staff for the impending holiday craziness. Beyond having helpful, well-trained agents at the ready, it’s smart to adopt technology to handle inquiries and get agents online faster.

Zingtree interactive decision trees are one way to avoid the headache of customer service disarray during the peak periods of November and December. With customers self-solving using customized decision trees and agents being guided with interactive scripts, your support team will have a happy holiday season instead of a hectic one.

Decision Trees for Customer Support

Happy customers lead to happy agent staff, and vice versa. Zingtree is an amazing tool for any customer support team, as it allows you to create custom troubleshooters to take customers, or agents, through the support flow step-by-step.

Organizations that deploy Zingtree troubleshooters have seen a 20% reduction in support costs on average. Customers are gently guided to answers, and, if a problem can’t be solved, your agents receive background information on the problem, saving time and resources. With no programming required, Zingtree decision trees and troubleshooters make it easy to build each step of the process so no important information is left behind.

With design customization and plugins to fit your integration needs, Zingtree can help you ramp up your support this season.

Agent Scripting Solutions

High-tech solutions can also empower your live support agents to be efficient and effective when communicating with customers. Agent Scripting is a robust tool for any company offering chat or phone support.

Scripts are easy to build using Zingtree’s tools, you’ll effectively reduce time and resources spent on holiday support. With powerful tracking and analytics, Zingtree agent scripts help companies collect useful data that can even be used to prepare for the holidays next year – we even have a direct integration with popular customer service platform, Zendesk!

Learn More

Remember – the holidays can be stressful, but with proper preparation for your call centers and support staff, you’ll make the load just a little bit lighter, and the season just a little more jolly!

Visit Zingtree.com to get started free for 30 days, and see how Zingtree will save you time and money.

Thanks to your suggestions, we’ve had a slew of great ideas for updates. Most recently, we’ve focused on how we handle the roles of multiple people in an organization all using Zingtree. Here are the highlights:

• Add/manage Collaborators has moved to the drop menu under This Tree, and on the main page of tools.
• Unassign (remove myself as collaborator), is now called “Remove Me”, and it found under manage Collaborators.
• The Collaborators screen shows YOUR permissions for the current tree.
• For payments and billing, there is now a single person in each organization that manages that function. Just this person gets email notices of receipts, too. This “Billing Administrator” can assign the role to someone else.

We also fixed a couple of small bugs, and did some usability studies and enhancements – all very subtle.

As always, please share your great ideas with us!

This week’s updates, as always, are all about YOU. Some recent customer requests that we added into Zingtree include:

• Persistent buttons now can be accessed via keyboard tabbing (Thanks Carl!)
• Tree nodes now have option to jump to a specific node in new tree (Thanks Oi Yee!)

And some other things that everybody wants:

• Added some server reliability checks and redundancy. We had a little bit of down time this week, and thanks to Amazon we now have a better system in place to keep traffic away from unhealthy servers.
• Cleaned up Tools menu colors and button positions. Hopefully this makes more sense, and you all have discovered the goodies in the More Tools menu by now.
• There are also a few more data integrity checks when using Designer.

Our customers are always smarter than we are, so if you have a suggestion, comment or bug report, tell us here.

Behind every great Zingtree decision tree is a powerfully built system. Understanding how these interactive decision trees work on a more fundamental level can help you to generate more effective, better customized trees to fit your needs.

If you’re new to Zingtree, this glossary of basic terms will help you understand how our system works.

Trees

Interactive Decision Trees are why we’re in business. They form the logic and structure of the knowledge you wantto share with others.

Trackable, customizable and dependable, Zingtrees are set up using three basic methods: Wizard, Designer, or right from scratch. After completing and saving your custom interactive decision tree, it can be embedded in your web site, or hosted by us. You can edit, preview and update your Trees whenever you’d like.

Here’s what one of our example trees looks like:

Nodes

A node is a page an end-user sees while using your tree, or an action that occurs.  Question Nodes and Answer Nodes show information, and give choices where to go next. Other kinds of nodes perform actions like sending an email, linking to a web page, opening another tree, or acting upon a session score.

Buttons

These are the clickable actions an end-user takes when interacting with a tree. You can see examples of buttons below in “buttons style” and “panels style”.

Buttons Style

Buttons are the traditional display method of your decision trees’ interface. With this design, your customers will see answer options shown as clickable buttons. Each individual button answer will lead to a separate path respectively, depending on your customer’s selection.

Panels Style

We developed a second user interface style that you can adopt for your custom decision trees. The Panels style displays the same information as the traditional Button style does, in a fresh way that is optimized for longer answers. Each panel answer will lead to the next step in the path depending on your customer’s choice.

You can try out both Buttons and Panels style in the Zingtree Gallery to see which method is right for you.

Question Nodes, Answer Nodes

Old fashioned Q&A nodes are by far the most popular. As the name implies, Question nodes allow you to ask a question to your customer and provide one or more answer buttons. On the other hand, final Answer nodes propose a solution for your customer and contain no buttons. You can add unlimited nodes and grow your decision trees as big as you want!

Link Nodes

Following up the Q&A nodes for most-utilized are Link Nodes, which can allow your customer to click through to another web page, such as a scheduling system, how-to video and more. The action of opening this new page is tracked automatically in your Zingtree Reporting for that specific tree.

Tree Nodes (Sub-trees)

For larger, more complex projects, Tree Nodes (or sub-trees) come in handy to break down your decision tree in a more digestible way.  Simply put, you can have a button open another tree.

You’ll find that these sub-trees can occur naturally during the planning stages of complex trees; by containing themes in different trees, and later linking them into one final tree using Tree Nodes, you can concentrate freely on one step at a time.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our Zingtree Terminology series coming soon. If you have any questions in the meantime, please contact the team!

Another recent goodie in the Zingtree arsenal of Call Center Agent tools is the new Require Confirmation to Continue option. If you’ve ever been on a call, and the agent says “This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes”, then you can see how this is helpful.

Agent’s View

On the agent side, they will see this:

Clicking the checkbox will activate the Continue button, and the agent can proceed with the script.

Author’s View

On the publishing side, when in Overview, Edit Node, any question node will show this Require Confirmation to Continue option:

Click the checkbox, and a message option appears:

The message appears as a part of the agent script, and it must be clicked upon for the agent to proceed. Pretty handy, eh?

If you have any questions, please reach out to us!

One of the most requested features for Zingtree is the ability to collect information from users while they are navigating your tree. And with this latest update, you can do it!

For example, your tree could gather data like this:

Here’s what you can do with Zingtree’s data entry feature:

• Include form fields in your trees (text, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, dates and numbers).
• Form data can be included dynamically in other parts of the tree. For example, you can ask for a name in the first node, and have that name appear in other parts of the tree.
• Form data can be exported into any other system, including Help Desk or CRM applications.

Example Tree

Try the Form Fields and Data Entry Demo tree from the gallery. This will ask you for some information, echo it in other parts of the tree, and finally inject it into a standard HTML form.

How to Include Form Fields in your Tree

From Overview, Edit Node, there is a new button in the editor that makes it easy to insert a form field:

Clicking this button opens a menu of form field options:

You can choose from the following types of fields:

• Text
• Multiline Text
• Date
• Number
• List Box
• Check Box
• Radio Buttons

Each field has a Label, and a Variable Name. The Label is shown next to the form field, and the Variable Name is used for referencing the stored value.

For radio buttons and list boxes, you can enter the number of items, and the basic form field will be generated for you.  (You may want to modify the HTML code for labels and list boxes later.)

Clicking Add Form Field adds this field to the current cursor location.

Inserting Form Field Data into Other Parts of the Tree

Once the end-user adds data to a form field and then clicks a button, this data can appear anywhere in the tree’s content, question or title areas.  The trick is to use the variable name, surrounded by # characters.

For example, add a text field named name, and then insert text like this into a node:

Hello #name#! Welcome back.

The #name# part will be replaced with whatever was entered previously into the name field.

Injecting Zingtree Form Data into Other Systems

Once your form fields are set up and your tree is running, the entered data can be injected into any other form.  Here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure the variable names in your Zingtree form match the variable names on the form you want to inject data into.
2. When opening the URL for the destination form, make sure to include &session_id=#session# in the link URL.
3. In the destination form, include this piece of code:

   <script id="zingtree_field_id" value="session_data" src="//zingtree.com/api/zingtree.js">
   </script>

When the destination form is opened, it will include the data from the Zingtree session in the fields that match.

The Form Fields and Data Entry gallery tree shows a full example. Click all the way through, and you’ll see an HTML page with Zingtree forms data present.

Notes

• The form fields button in the editor is not available in Designer. You’ll need to use Overview, Edit Node to access it.
• Tech note: If you’re hand-coding the HTML for your forms, each form element must have a class of zt-data to be recognized and saved.

Here’s an example of how Zingtree’s interactive decision trees are helping to improve and advance customer support processes in a cutting-edge software company. 

Applian Technologies develops powerful, affordable streaming media recording software for the Windows and Mac user. As a bustling technology company, Applian has always used traditional support methods to stay ahead of customer communications. After performing a ticket analysis, they found that they were spending far too much time and resources on each ticket, and decided to take action.

After adopting Zingtree’s solution, Applian was able to save over 15 hours each week on support communications, $30,000 in valuable resources, and more!

You can view the case study below, and open a PDF version here.

Want to see more? Explore the Zingtree Gallery for examples of how our decision trees and interactive solutions provide value for businesses!

Zingtree’s Form Fields feature for list boxes has been tied into the Scoring Nodes feature.  This means that you can have your end-users use a list box control to pick an option, and then branch according to the option chosen.

For example, you may have a person select from a list of states, and based upon their selection, you would branch to the proper node.  This is a lot cleaner than having 50 buttons, one for each state.

The Small Claims Limit demo tree shows how this is done.

Implementation Details

When you add a List Box form type into your tree, you can offer several options to the end-user. If you examine the HTML code, it may look like this:


<div class="form-group">
<label class="control-label" for="agelist"> Age: </label>
<select name="agelist" class="form-control zt-data">
<option value="<18" score="18">&lt;18</option>
<option value="18-30" score="30">18-30</option>
<option value="31-50" score="50">31-50</option>
<option value=">50" score="200">&gt;50</option>
</select></div>

By modifying the score= attribute on each option, if that option is picked, the score increments by the value shown. In the example above, if the end-user picks 18-30, then the score for that choice increases by 18, the score= attribute.

From there, use a Scoring Node to branch according to the cumulative score.

This Thanksgiving Week’s updates cover a variety of things, all inspired by people like you.

Here’s what’s new:

• Email nodes now display in French, Dutch and Spanish, depending upon the preferred browser language setting (h/t Théophile).
• Published trees: Back button just shows an arrow for non-English users.
• Agent portal: Added search box to locate trees matching title or tags (h/t Tom S. and others).
• New Tree search API
• Now properly saves non-English characters in Edit Node (h/t Ksenia)
• New: Print node option in Overview.

Also, Ben C. helped us find and fix a rare error in recovering snapshots.

We’re thankful for our great customers who continue to help us make Zingtree better and better. Thanks guys!