In collaboration with our partners at USU, we recently released a report on “Using Decision Trees in Customer Service” – so we thought we’d summarise some of the key takeaways. If you’d like to read it in full, let us know! We’d be more than happy to send you a copy.
As organisations continue to move towards more customer-focussed strategies and increase their focus on customer experience, decision trees are quickly becoming a critical component of many organisations’ toolkits.
In case you’re not familiar with the concept of decision trees (or you need a quick refresh!), decision trees are essentially flowcharts that help you visualise service and contact centre processes and potential outcomes.
There’s inherent uncertainty around the range and level of issues customer service/contact centre agents can face on a day-to-day basis – so how do organisations ensure consistent quality and results for their customers in light of this?
And while no one can predict the future, using decision trees can help alleviate some of this uncertainty, by modelling how specific scenarios are likely to play out.
Using decision trees, organisations can create guided pathways for agents to follow in order to solve the more complex issues they face in a structured way – as well as mitigating the risk of customer complaints regarding things like long hold times and repeatedly being asked for the same information.
Using decision trees ensures:
- Consistent agent performances in contact centres
- No skipped or missed questions
- Increased first contact resolution rates
- Fewer call transfers
- Higher agent satisfaction
Reducing the amount of information an agent has to remember, and simplifying a complex process into a series of easy to follow steps helps reduce the number of challenges an agent has to overcome, such as:
- Finding the appropriate information
- Long search times
- Agents sticking too closely to scripts
- Long on-boarding/training times
- Inconsistent performances
Decision trees can be used across a range of channels –not just in your contact centres. From chatbots to self-service options, through to voice assistants, using these can ensure you’re providing not only a standard level of service from your contact centre agents but across all possible customer touch-points. Moreover, industry doesn’t matter – standardising your service processes will benefit your agents and your customers regardless of which industry you operate in.
Having a solid knowledge base is beneficial when it comes to creating decision trees for your business – as you already have content, and usage data about this content, to understand which decision trees may be most beneficial to create for your organisation.