Quantcast
Channel: Zingtree Technical Blog
Viewing all 405 articles
Browse latest View live

Tree Search API

$
0
0

Some of our customers with a lot of trees have asked us to incorporate a tree search feature into Zingtree.  This is handy for both internal use (Call Centers/Agent Scripting), as well as external use (support and troubleshooting). The goal is to make it easy for someone to find the proper tree.

Our Tree Search uses two pieces of information to locate trees: the tree Name, and the tree’s Tags.  Both of these are found in Settings.

Agent Interface

For internal use, our Agent Portal now includes the ability to find trees in two ways:

  • You can filter trees by tags from a drop-down list.
  • You can enter text to search.

Zingtree Hosted End-User Interface

For external use, you can have a search form where your end-users enter a search term, and any trees with Names or Tags matching the search term are displayed as links.

The easiest way is to use a Zingtree hosted search form.  Go to your Organizations and Billing page, and locate the Hosted Tree Search link at the bottom of the page. Click this link to open the search form.  You can share this URL with your customers.

An example using the Zingtree Gallery is here.

Tree Search API

If you want to include Tree Search on your own site, you’ll need to make use of our simple API. You can see a demo of the API in action here.

The process is:

  1. Locate your API Key at the bottom of the Organizations and Billing page.
  2. Create your search form.
  3. When the search is submitted, call our API like this:
    http://zingtree.com/api/tree-search.php?apikey={your API key}&search={your urlencoded search query)
  4. The API returns a JSON object of trees that match the search query. The JSON has the tree ID, and the tree name. The data looks like this:
    {"815089605":"Agent Script - Set Appointment",
    "164166011":"Pet Rock Demo",
    "666464897":"Simple Sales Funnel Demo",
    "506992892":"Training Simulation Template",
    "867287049":"Zingtree Tour"}
  5. Parse the JSON data to make links for each tree.

We’ve built a PHP sample to illustrate one way to implement this API. Download the example source code here.

You can try the sample here.

 


4 Reasons Why Call Center Scripts are the Key to Surviving the Holidays

$
0
0

While many associate the term “Black Friday” with the official start to the holidays, it actually refers to that time of year when many retailers see their profits go from “being in the red” to “being in the black.” Within the contact center world, only two seasons exist: pre-holidays and post-holidays. Fortunately for these centers, much of the chaos surrounding temporary agents can be minimized with personnel training and a good scripting solution.

For many organizations, this is the time of year when new relationships can be forged, giving scripts an important role in the overall customer experience. The holidays are the perfect time to show potential and returning customers the breadth of your product line, and even increase sales. Here are some of the ways that a call center scripting solution can enhance the customer’s experience (even when relying on less-trained, temporary agents):

Consistency

All of the reasons why customers may call into your contact center can be tracked and monitored, and therefore specific scripts can be created so that customers will have a similar experience, regardless of the agent who takes the call.

Natural flow

Organized like a flow chart, scripts prompt agents to probe deeper or ask new questions depending on the answers given. This allows for a more natural flow of conversation where the customer feels they are being heard, rather than an agent reading off a linear script, which can come off as not only robotic, but disrespectful.

Train agents faster

Scripts, especially for temporary staff, can help call center agents deliver better experiences with less training involved. These scripts are in no way a replacement for training, but they do provide increased flexibility, especially during the holidays.

Improve customer experience & KPIs

Scripts that incorporate best practices from top performing agents can positively impact Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). By standardizing best practices within your call center through scripts, poorer performing agents and temps can more quickly, improve their performance, and deliver more consistent customer service.

There are a number of ways that contact centers can prepare for the upcoming season, from cloud-based workforce management software and scheduling solutions to scripting. When these scripts are done right, most customers won’t even realize the agent is being guided. And, with strategic planning that starts well in advance of the holidays, there is no reason that contact centers can’t easily handle the increased hustle and bustle!

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

Updates for Decision Tree Authors

$
0
0

Our latest enhancements to Zingtree have focused on making our authoring tools even better.

Copying Nodes

You can now copy nodes from one tree to another.  Use the new Copy button in Overview to set this in motion. (h/t Pavels).

Node Feedback

There’s a new option for publishing Zingtree Hosted trees.  You can now add a Feedback button to the bottom of each node.

When an end-user clicks this, they’ll be able to send you comments about the node and tree currently in view. All Authors will receive a notification for this Feedback; you can see which nodes contain comments in Overview.

When editing a node, you can view all of the comments for that node, as well as remove them. This is really handy for Call Centers, as it gives agents a way to direct feedback to Authors in a convenient way. This is also in place in the Agent Portal by default. (Thanks to Travis and John for this suggestion.)

Other

  • Viewing the session data via our API now shows the time spent on each node. ( h/t Travis again).
  • We eliminated some confusion around canceling accounts.

Thanks again for everyone’s comments. We are Authors too, so if YOU have a suggestion, please send it along!

How to Use Zingtree’s Gallery to Build a Decision Tree

$
0
0

We created the Zingtree Gallery with you in mind, making it simple to generate powerful decision trees to fit your needs. In the online Gallery, you’ll find a helpful selection of pre-made Trees that can be explored, copied and customized for any project.

The existing decision trees in the Zingtree Gallery have all been created by other Zingtree authors, and are free to use for inspiration or duplication. You’ll find robust, pre-made decision trees spanning many key areas, including Customer Support / Troubleshooting, Call Centers, Training, Medical, and more.

All of the trees found in our online Gallery are free to view, export, or embed into your own website. You can even view live usage statistics and graphs, or submit your own generated Tree to help others!

Follow these instructions to copy and use a gallery tree:

  1. Head to the Gallery and select the decision tree you’d like to use.
  2. Choose to Play the demo to see a live preview, Examine to explore reporting, editing and design tools, or Copy to create a duplicate for your personal account.
  3. After Copying your decision tree of choice, rename it and add an appropriate description.
  4. Manage your new Tree from “My Trees” on the Zingtree website, where you can edit, preview and more!

Visit the Zingtree Gallery to get started, or contact us with any questions!

The Feedback Loop: Getting Comments From End-Users and Agents

$
0
0

blog-howto

One new feature super-user Travis suggested to us was the ability for people using trees to send notes back to the authors. For Travis’s company, they wanted a way for their Call Center agents to easily comment on any node, and have that feedback reach the authors of the tree. This seemed like such an obviously beneficial idea that we re-prioritized to make it happen.

The result is a subtle comment bubble, which can appear at the bottom right-hand-side of any tree: 

How the Feedback Loop Works

Both Zingtree hosted end-user trees and internal agent (Call Center) trees can use this feedback feature. To illustrate, we’ll use the Zingtree Agent Portal as an example.

Here’s how a tree appears, showing the comment bubble:

 

When an agent clicks the comment bubble, they get a simple pop-up feedback form:

When feedback is sent, all authors get an email notification:

You can see all nodes with comments from Overview. They have an icon like this: 

Example:

Finally, when you Edit a Node, you can see and delete all comments, like this:

Comments for End-User Support Trees

This feature is not limited to Call Centers. If you’re using Zingtree for end-user support, you can enable the comment bubble in Zingtree-hosted trees. Use the Advanced Hosting Options from Publish, Zingtree Hosting, or simply add this to the URL for your tree:

&feedback=1

Zopim Chat Decision Tree Front-End

$
0
0

zopim-2

Beyond using Zingtree decision trees, one of the best things you can do to ensure a positive customer experience is to integrate a live chat system like Zopim. Live chat is convenient for customers, and a time and resource-saver for companies. In fact, in a survey conducted by Forrester, 44% of respondents said that having a live person answer their questions was one of the most important features a website could offer.

To make live chat even more valuable, and excellent customer support more easily achievable, we updated our software to allow Zingtree to open a Zopim chat, gather information from your clients before the chat session begins, and include a transcript of the Zingtree session as a part of the chat.

Here’s the end-result:

View our Zingtree + Zopim demo.

Requirements:

  • Your tree must be embedded on your site.
  • You need to have a Zopim chat client in place on the page that contains your tree.

How to open a Zopim chat session, and include the current Zingtree transcript:

  1. Go to Overview.
  2. Edit the node you want to trigger the chat, and  set the Parent Action to Zopim: New: #session#
  3. On the hosting page, include this script before the </body> tag:
    <script src="//zingtree.com/api/chat/zopim.js"></script>

That’s it!

Source Code:

You can examine the Zopim Demo tree from the Gallery.

Update: Zingtree Chat Integrations

$
0
0

NL-header-updates3

Zingtree has always been a great front-end for email support, but why not chat? For any organizations doing live support via chat, Zingtree can be a great time-saver. Not only can customers find answers to their problems before going to chat, but if they open chat, a Zingtree transcript can be delivered along with the first message, which saves the support agent time and avoids asking repetitive questions.

Zingtree can also collect info via data entry forms, and then deliver it to the chat box, which will save your team even more time. Our Contact Us page uses this method.

This update has chat integrations for:

Is there another chat system you’d like to see supported? Chat or email us now!

P.S. Thanks to Grégory for this idea!

Chat Integration: Intercom.io and Zingtree

$
0
0

intercom-blog

Live chat is an incredibly useful way to connect to our customers, both for offering support and for getting insights into new product ideas we may never have thought of ourselves. We are happily using Intercom.io, which allows us to track chat and email conversations with each customer.

To save our customers some typing, and make it faster for us to answer questions, we’ve built our Contact page using Zingtree. For technical and sales inquiries, the tree leads to an end point that opens Intercom chat, with information about the problem already pre-populated. For technical queries, we also use Zingtree Data Entry forms to get the tree ID, node and URL of any problem reports.

Once you go through the tree to submit a technical question, here’s what appears in Intercom:

Intercom chat with Zingtree

Demos:

Requirements:

  • Your tree must be embedded on your site.
  • You need to have the Intercom chat client in place on the page that contains your tree.

How to open an Intercom chat session, and include the Zingtree transcript and data entry:

  1. Go to Overview.
  2. Edit the node you want to trigger the chat, and  set the Parent Action to Intercom: New: #session#.When a customer lands on this node, this Parent Action is triggered.
  3. On the hosting page, include this script before the </body> tag:
    <script src="//zingtree.com/api/chat/intercom.js"></script>

It’s that easy!

Source Code:

From the Zingtree Gallery, you can see two examples:


Zingtree Terminology: Understanding Your Decision Trees Pt. 2

$
0
0

Understanding how our Zingtree interactive decision trees work on a fundamental level can help you generate more effective trees to fit your needs.

If you’re new to Zingtree, or just have a curious mind, our glossary of basic terms will help you understand how our system works.

Authors

Authors are the individuals that have created a Zingtree decision tree, along with those who have access to view and edit. You can also refer to your Authors as “collaborators.”

With various Zingtree plans, you can add anywhere from 1 to 50 different Authors to contribute to and collaborate on your decision trees; ideal for call centers and other companies with large teams.

Scripts 

Much like in learning your lines for a play, a script is used as a guide for customer service agents to follow along with. Scripts are written in the company’s tone of voice, and adhere’s to its personalized standards, making it easier for agents to portray the correct information and provide help to the customers.

Zingtree offers a powerful call center agent scripting solution that lets you quickly create and deploy custom scripts, and then analyze them per session and view performance summaries.

Scoring

Zingtree’s Scoring feature allows you to assign a numeric value to each answered question, along with actions based on the running total score. Scoring with an Evaluation tree is ideal for generating interactive online tests, quizzes, assessments, training simulations and more.

As the user goes through your decision tree, Zingtree keeps a running total of the score values of all the clicked buttons. When you’re ready to act upon the total score, create a new “Score Branch Node,” where you can specify a range of score values to redirect to specific nodes.

Tagging

Tagging lets you add a list of category tags to both nodes and trees, making it easier to organize nodes in large trees, as well as organize large libraries of trees.

If you’re working from your nodes and searching for a specific type, you can add one or more tags to each node, then use the Overview to show only those nodes that include a certain tag. You can also add one or more tags to each tree from the My Trees page, allowing you filter your list of trees based upon those tags.

Snapshots

Snapshots are a handy feature within Zingtree that collects and data that has changed from one decision tree version to another. With Snapshots, you can recover old versions of your trees, view your teammates’ edits, and compare revisions to the current tree you’re working on, and more.

Screen Shot 2015-12-09 at 2.10.34 PM

Snapshots are very helpful when creating trees with multiple revisions or working with a team. To find this tool, select More Tools, then Snapshots in your Zingtree account.

Analytics

Zingtree Analytics includes data on your custom decision trees’ outcomes, traffic, location breakdowns and more. You’ll get detailed insights into how your trees are being used to guide product, service and process optimizations.

End-User Sessions

In the digital world, an end-user is simply the person who is using your product and navigating through your decision tree.  An end-user session refers to a person outside your company (not an employee or call center agent) interacting with your tree. Zingtree’s pricing for support, troubleshooting, and other external applications works by counting these end-user sessions, meaning that you only get charged when a person clicks a button in your tree. Whether they use one click or 100, the cost remains the same.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of our Zingtree Terminology series coming soon, and check out Part 1 right here. If you have any questions in the meantime, please contact the team!

Friday Features: Zingtree Holiday Updates

$
0
0

NL-header-zing5

It’s really redundant to give ourselves a shout-out for giving new updates to our customers as a Holiday gift, since we do this throughout the year anyway. But every blog post needs a theme, so there you have it.

Here are the latest updates!

Some fixes for data entry forms:

  • Data entry fields now replace ALL occurrences of that variable in the tree, not just the first one. (h/t Christopher)
  • Passing data entry field variables to subtrees now works properly.
  • Identically named form fields in separate nodes caused data to be erased. We now only save data if it’s not blank.
  • Adds form data to email session transcripts (h/t Andrew).
  • Parent Actions can be used to pass Zingtree data to other systems.

And a smattering of other things:

  • Deleted trees no longer appear via publishing links (h/t Tess).
  • Bug fix: Tree with no nodes no longer crashes Designer (h/t Ben).
  • New Answers-only toggle for history display. Look for the [A] button at the top right of the History panel. (h/t William).

And finally, our Feedback page is making use of Zingtree’s recent Intercom chat integration, so if you have a suggestion, go over and tell us!

What in the World Do You Bring to a Holiday Party?

$
0
0

It’s true – the holidays are a stressful time! We thought we’d share this fun decision tree aimed to help you think a little less this season.

Happy Holidays from Team Zingtree!

$
0
0

We’ve had a truly amazing year, and hope you have, too! Wishing you all a very happy holiday season, and a warm and wonderful New Year.

– Team Zingtree

Employee Training Simulations using Decision Trees

$
0
0

Because Zingtree is such a powerful interactive tool, it is a prime resource for creating and implementing training programs, simulations, guides, evaluations and more. You can take advantage of the Zingtree platform to create a program based on an existing decision tree, design your own from scratch, or take the process step-by-step; the choice is yours!

Training Your Employees

As with all training programs, yours should be relevant to your company or the position, easily digestible, and appropriate to the person using the simulation. Providing these kinds of tools for different types of positions, situations and learners is important if what is being taught will be incorporated into common workplace practices.

How to copy a basic training program:

1. Sign in to your account and go to the Zingtree Gallery.

2. Go to Training and find the Training Simulation template, then click to Play the tree. From here, you’ll be able to Copy or Examine more closely.

Screen Shot 2015-11-17 at 12.14.33 PM

3. Rename your training program to fit your needs, add a description, and Copy when ready.

4. Modify the decision tree content to generate your own customized training simulation!

Using the Wizard

To create an advanced training program from scratch, try using the Zingtree Wizard tool. With the Wizard, you’ll be able to fill out simple forms to generate your customized decision tree as it guides you through the creation process. You provide the questions and answers that your employees will see in the program, and the Wizard goes through each scenario asking for more information.

Using the Designer

For those who enjoy getting down to a fine point with design, try drawing your training program visually with the Zingtree Designer. With the Designer, you can drag new nodes into the drawing area, and connect them with labeled arrows. Each nodes correspond to a page in your tree, and the arrows represent the button choices from each node.

 

 

 

Performing Employee Evaluations

 

Once training is completed and your employee has settled into his or her rhythm, it’s important to keep up with evaluations to test their knowledge and progress.

For decision trees created with employee evaluations in mind, we’ve coupled Zingtree’s robust logic with a scoring system that can allow you add a value to each answer, and later act upon the total weighted score. Explore our Evaluation examples to preview existing creations, and copy any of the projects to make into your own.

Hungry for more examples and inspiration? Head to the Zingtree Gallery for all the decision trees you can copy and use to fit your needs. 

How You Can Simplify Medical Triage With Decision Trees

$
0
0

Before medical professionals even had digital options, they were figuring out ways to generate decision trees to solve difficult medical problems and obtain diagnoses. The decision tree is an incredibly powerful tool for healthcare purposes, and the introduction of intelligent, interactive options has made the process that much simpler.

Zingtree has a proven record of assisting medical professionals in a number of scenarios by making it easy to build a sophisticated triage or diagnosis system. By providing tools to create a user-friendly, digital way to gather patient information, Zingtree simplifies the pre-diagnosis or diagnosis process for patients, doctors, nurses and more.

1. Streamline Triage, Exams & Enrollment:

Risk assessment, patient enrollment and medical examinations have all been somewhat tedious tasks for the patient to be involved in. In order to ease their worries and expedite the treatment process as much as possible for all parties, you can create a decision tree for a more streamlined approach to gathering pertinent information, and routing patients to the right specialists. When the decision tree session has been completed, this Q&A patient information can also be delivered securely in a HIPAA compliant fashion for simplicity.


2. Intelligent Pre-Diagnosis:

Medical diagnosis is one of those things in life that lends itself to a troubleshooting process. By asking a patient a few questions and then reacting to the answers with appropriate follow-up questions for more relevant information, medical professionals can narrow down the possibilities of what’s affecting a patient, rule out certain scenarios, and facilitate treatment options quickly. With scoring options available, you can also numerically weight answers and assign a score to each question answered to later act intelligently upon the total score.


3. Provide Medical Guidance & More:

A Zingtree interactive decision tree built with solid medical advice from an expert in the field can take patients through an intuitive process to help determine what steps to take next. Most often, healthcare professionals and organizations use Zingtree to screen patients, route them to correct departments, and fill out forms in a secure, HIPAA compliant way.

View real, live examples of medical decision trees in the Zingtree Medical Decision Tree Gallery for inspiration, or to copy and use the format for your own medical practice or healthcare needs!

Are you interested in trying out a Zingtree decision tree for your medical practice? Contact us with any questions, or get started with your free trial today.

How To Measure Results of Your Decision Trees

$
0
0

One of our customers recently asked us how to go about measuring the performance of a Zingtree decision tree. This is an important part of your relationship with Zingtree, since everybody wants to see how effective your trees are at saving time and money.

Here’s how measuring results works: Each node in the tree can be labelled with success, failure, or an unknown result. The result for the entire session uses the label for the last node visited. For example, if the last node is an “I need help” node that directs to a technician, then the overall session is tagged as failure. If the last node visited proposed a solution to a problem, then the session is a success.

How to label nodes to track results:

1. Go to the decision tree you wish to analyze, and open the Overview.

2. Make sure that each node in your tree is categorized properly, using the “Categorize this node’s result” option in Edit Node. (The category of the last node visited is used to indicate success or failure of the entire session). Here are your menu options:

category

3. Once this is set up, wait a few days for real people to use your tree to gather data. When you want to see how well your trees are performing, go to Usage Reports.

4. Select the Results report, enter the desired date range, and you can see how your tree performed:

results-report

That’s it! Any more questions? Feel free to contact us at any time. 


Why Millennials Want Independence in Customer Support

$
0
0

(Image via Gen HQ)

Customer service delivery preferences are rapidly changing. This is in part due to technological advances, but also the customers themselves —particularly millennial customers. This demographic cohort increasingly prefers to take CS employees out of the equation completely and simply do it themselves. Whether it’s purchasing groceries or other goods online, the millennial generation is antsy to self-serve.

As customer demands have evolved over the years, so too has self-service. Many businesses offer only limited self-service choices, which can quickly frustrate their millennial customer base. If your company’s self-serve options are restricted to general tasks, it’s time to explore how you can make this feature more comprehensive to meet the demands of millennials.

The Hard Facts of Millennial Customer Service

Numerous studies conducted by various firms have repeatedly shown that millennials prefer to self-serve and self-help rather than interact with a company representative, and the numbers really speak for themselves. In fact, in a comprehensive study it was discovered that:

  • Nearly 70% of millennial females are comfortable resolving CS issues on their own, without having to interact with a company representative.
  • 64% of millennials prefer self-service, whereas only forty-seven percent of baby boomers do.
  • 56% of millennials moved their business elsewhere as a result of poor customer service.

One reason for the popularity of self-service in this demographic group is that they can remain in control of online purchasing and other habits. Millennials expect efficient, 24/7 access to any online support decision, whether it’s updating an account profile or making a purchase. Self-service in modern times is more than an FAQ; the future of customer service will be much more customizable, interactive, and will put the customer in the driver’s seat.

Contact Centers Still Matter

Providing more self-directed features doesn’t make a call center obsolete, but it does change its function. Contact centers will need to handle more sophisticated and technical inquiries, and will have to hire, train and staff to address this need. If companies don’t adapt to meet current and future customer demands, they’ll likely frustrate customers and risk losing business.

Companies can no longer rest on the laurels of their brand, product or service; they must stay ahead of the curve and understand that how customers interact with them is often more important than the product itself. Self-service is looming large on the horizon of customer service delivery preferences – don’t fade into the sunset because you missed the boat on where the industry is headed! The future of customer service will be more self-controlled, but ready with agents to help guide customers to success.

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

Marketing Case Study: Global Players

$
0
0

Here’s an example of how Zingtree’s interactive decision trees are helping to improve online marketing efforts in a real education abroad organization.

Global Players helps to place student-athletes in their perfect study-abroad fit, promoting awareness and cultural education as well as athletic endeavors around the world. As an organization growing in popularity, Global Players was in search of finding a streamlined, self-service way to placing students in their ideal location abroad.

Since adopting Zingtree’s solution to integrate their “Program Match” decision tree, Global Players has been able to place over 1,000 students so far, increased the likelihood of a visitor to contact the organization by 5 times, and more!

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

casestudy-global_players copy

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

The Visual Designer: Drawing Out Your Decision Tree

$
0
0

Everyone prefers their own way of creating, and it can come in many forms. To address this, we built Zingtree with a few different ways to design and construct an interactive decision tree.

For the more visual learner, the Zingtree Visual Designer allows you to draw out your decision tree. This “white board” style lets users to create nodes, along with their connections, and see the nitty gritty details of how the tree functions.

Here’s how to get started with the Visual Designer:

1. Once you log in to your Zingtree account and start Designer, you’ll see a screen that looks like the one shown below, with one node already in place as a green box. This is the very first node your users will see and interact with.

2. Click on Node #1, and you’ll see an edit window pop up on the right hand side. You can edit the Title, Question and main Content segments to your liking.

3. Drag new nodes into the design area – these correspond to the pages in your decision tree. Again, select the green box to edit each node’s Question, Content, etc.

4. When you’re ready, add a Final Answer Node and edit to fit your needs. These will appear in blue, to differentiate from your green Question Nodes.

5. Continue to create these Questions & Answer Nodes by dragging new nodes into the design area, and then connect them using labeled arrows. The connecting arrows represent the button selections from each node.

6. Finish linking all of your nodes using this method, and you’ll end up with a finished product that looks something like this image below. Often times, Zingtree users only use this mode as a way of assembling their decision trees. Please keep in mind that things can get confusing for more complex trees that require more nodes.

For a more in-depth tutorial, watch this video to see how to build the example tree above using Zingtree Designer:

 

To view more ways of building your decision trees, check out our Zingtree Design Tutorials.

Updates: Instant Result Tracking and more

$
0
0

After publishing our article on Result Tracking with Zingtree, it occurred to us that we could do better.  Rather than having to wait for people to use your decision trees to see results, we decided it would be much more useful to be able to show success/failure/undecided results immediately whenever you change the category of any node.

So if you have a tree that’s been in use, go back and categorize each node using Overview, Edit Node. Then view the Results report to see how successful your tree has been. If you change the category of a node, results reporting updates instantly.

Some other updates with this release:

  • New: You can use zt-name and zt-email for data entry variable names to have these automatically propagate into email submit form fields for name and email (h/t Todd).
  • New: Insert #source# or #agent# in any question or final answer node to insert the name of the agent using the tree  (h/t Nilou).
  • New: You can add Custom CSS to ALL your trees using a new checkbox in any tree’s Settings.
  • Bug fix: You can no longer remove yourself as a collaborator when there are no other admins.
  • Update: The ‘A’ button in the history area now hides goto link (ht/t Bill S.)
  • Update: Sessions List CSV export now includes session ID, ticket ID if present. (h/t Travis)

3 Best Tips for Excellent Communication with Customers

$
0
0

Providing amazing customer service is more than lending an ear and a smile; it’s about having an ongoing communication that is fruitful for both the customer and the company!

According to some recent customer service statistics, 55% of consumers have intended to make a purchase, but backed out because of frustration or poor customer service – that means that over half of these opportunities to gain a new customer are held back by bad communication. On the other hand, 52% of consumers have made more purchases from a company after having a good customer service experience.

These days, adopting a system of unbeatable customer communication is critical to company success. Here are our best tips for how to develop great communication habits.

1. Always be straight-forward and concise.

At first glance, it may seem simple to keep this short and sweet; in reality, it’s a process that takes some practice to make perfect.

Start out with your first draft response, then go through it again and eliminate any unnecessary words. Then, go through again with an even finer-toothed comb to get rid of anything repetitive or extra that does not support your main concept. Providing emphasis when needed (for instance, bolding important information) can also go a long way when attempting to give succinct, clear instructions.

2. Provide helpful visuals when you can.

Words can often convolute more complicated processes and explanations. Not only are visuals nice to look at, they can convey information to a customer better than text in many cases.

Try using screenshots marked up with arrows, descriptive tutorial videos, or simple GIFs to help get the message across. Using visual aids to break up often text-heavy customer communications is not only pleasing to the eye, but also helps the customer to understand more easily and absorb the process they are looking at.

3. Reduce the effort of communication for everyone.

Providing multiple channels of contact is crucial to having truly well-developed communication with customers. No matter their demographics, psychographics or geographic location, your customers have to be able to reach you in the medium that is most convenient for them. For instance, having easy access to online chat, phone, and email support is incredibly important to cater to everyone’s needs.

Additionally, it’s important that your customers have access to ways of self-help. With a robust knowledge base of information, along with customized troubleshooter decision trees, customers will find it easy to find the answers they are looking for and walk away with a smile on their face!

Have any more unmissable tips on providing amazing customer support through communication? Send them our way!

Viewing all 405 articles
Browse latest View live