Role of Decision Trees in 360 Customer Experience

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“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

Peter Drucker

Whether we realize it or not, we are making decisions all the time. To study or to sleep, to work or to play, to do shopping online or offline, we are choosing from the various choices available to us keeping in mind various factors all the time, most of the time without even realizing that we are doing so.

Similar to the personal lives where people are selecting the best out of the various alternatives available, decision making also plays a very crucial role in businesses. While most of the times, decisions are related to the more day-to-day functioning of the organization and not considerably business threatening, sometimes, these decisions can be important enough to make or break an organization.

For example, one of the historical decisions taken by the Founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton was to hold all-employee meetings every Saturday morning. It led to a culture of rapid information and decision making in the organization, which in turn created one of the biggest companies of that era.

Now that we have understood that decision making is very crucial in businesses, it is also important to understand how businesses make rational decisions with the help of decision tree software.

Decision Trees

A decision tree is a diagram/chart used by individuals, businesses to determine a course of action. Each branch of the decision tree represents a possible decision, outcome, or reaction. The farthest branches on the tree represent results (also known as resolutions). Benefits of decision trees are,

  • They are visual in nature and thus simple to understand and interpret by most people.
  • Help in determining the worst, the best and expected values for different scenarios.
  • A meticulous approach filled with visuals is followed as all the possible outcomes of the problem are considered along with tracing of every branch till conclusion. Thus, decision trees are quite exhaustive in nature.
  • Variety of problems can be solved with the help of decision trees. They can be useful for business managers, technicians, engineers, medical staff, etc. to take decisions under uncertain conditions.

5 Business benefits of interactive decision trees

#1. Enhanced Customer Experience

According to a study by Adobe, 54% of retailers said the customer experience is their most important area of focus way ahead of cross-channel marketing (16%), data-driven marketing (14%), mobile (11%), and programmatic buying/optimization (4%)

So how do decision trees help in improving the experience of customers and consequently playing a key role in the success of businesses?

Every organization wants to be in contact with customers all the time so that whenever the customer faces any problem and it is analyzed carefully,  the root cause of the problem is recognized and the problem is solved quickly.

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Decision trees can be quite useful in this regard as they can be effortlessly integrated with any channel. Then, troubleshooting can be done easily leading to empowered employees and satisfied customers.

#2. It Improves AHT

Average Handle Time (AHT) measures the average time taken to handle a particular call from the start to finish until a solution is provided. As decision trees are stored in the form of guided explanation, it helps the agent to deliver the solutions quickly and efficiently.

Using decision trees can help in obtaining customer-specific information faster and thus helping the agents to provide personalized service to customers.

Top problems faced by the customers can be managed with a generalized approach where agents can provide the solutions with a decision-tree based troubleshooting guide with them.  Thus, an agent can handle more calls easily in a better way leading to higher revenues for the companies.

For example, suppose there are just 5 problems which are faced by most of the customers of a company. These 5 problems constitute approximately 77% of the calls received by the agents and are such that they can be rarely solved by customers themselves with help of FAQ’s or other help made available to them, so these problems can be effectively solved by agents only.

Now, whenever the problem is received by an agent via a customer, if the agent starts from zero, then it will take a lot of time, but with the help of decision tree-based troubleshooting guide, the agents can solve the problem faster and in a more structured manner.

It is interesting to note that if agents can save 20% of the time in terms of AHT, they can serve 25% more customers, considering other factors kept constant, leading to higher profits for the companies.

#3. Optimizes costs

It is important to note that businesses focus not only on profit maximization but also on cost optimization. Cost optimization does not necessarily imply cutting off costs everywhere the business. Rather, the focus is on optimal use of resources so that the money is used in value-adding activities instead of non-value adding activities.

As the scale of customer service increases, the operational expenses associated with it also increases. Interactive customer support provided by decision trees helps in saving finances by reducing the need to repetitively communicate with customers and result in higher First Call Resolutions (FCR). Higher FCRs reduce the number of calls and consequently reduce contact centre cost.

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#4. Helps in training agents

Decision trees help companies not only on the customer side but also on the employee side by helping in training the agents. According to a report by SHRM, a graphical question and response pattern can reduce the on-boarding time of new agents by up to 80%.

To put it in simple terms, it means that with the help of decision trees, onboarding can be done in just 1 day instead of 5 days, thus saving a lot of costs, time and resources for the organizations.

The benefit of decision trees is not only limited to new recruits of companies. The advantages extend to experienced agents as well as they can focus on providing solutions with a readily available resource whenever needed.

Also, interactivity can be increased by adding features like videos and images to display information at every step. Decision trees can be also used in situational training of agents with each tree simulating different situations in a structured way.

#5. Self-service solution

In research carried out by Nuance, 67% of respondents preferred self-service over speaking to a company representative. This shows that a lot of customers in the modern era want to find the solutions of their problems themselves. Decision trees integrated with knowledge management software provide the privilege to use and provide the information conveniently.

So using interactive decision trees, customers can be guided towards the solutions in a step-by-step manner. It not only helps the customer to quickly find apt solutions to their problems but also increases customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty.

Conclusion

To conclude, decision trees can provide a visual representation of what will be the result of choosing a specific decision in a step-by-step manner and thus will result in more acceptable solutions for customers.

Decision trees convert the unpredictability of handling complicated customer interactions into replicable, sustainable workflows leading to improving the overall performance of knowledge management (KM) systems.

Pratik Salia
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