To design your Topics hierarchy, we recommend this process based on our experience helping our Customers use Topics. This is a “bottoms-up” approach where you build your set of Topics based on past Conversations your Customers have had with you. This process can take a couple of hours, but it’s also a fun exercise to do with a co-worker.
Starting your Topic Hierarchy design #
- Start by exporting a few days’ or weeks’ worths of Conversations and open them in Excel.
- Add a new column, and call it “Topic.”
- Read through each conversation and write a word in the “Topic” column to categorize what the conversation is “about” (or multiple words if the Conversation is about more than one thing). Don’t overthink it, and don’t worry about being consistent with naming – we’ll clean it up later.
- When you stop seeing new Conversations and are repeating the same categories, you can stop.
- Go through the “Topic” column and write down all the unique topics (either in a separate spreadsheet, word processor, paper, whiteboard, wherever it’s convenient). Combine similar ones, expand broad ones, and use consistent words. Now you’ve got your starting list of Topics!
- Next, group similar Topics together. Assign a name to each group. These are your hierarchy categories. This is also known as “affinity diagramming.”
- If you have many hierarchy groups, you can repeat this process until you get to a manageable number.
- Look through your proposed hierarchy for missing Topics, overlapping Topics, and so on (see above for recommended principles).
- Test your proposed hierarchy by pulling up past Conversations and applying Topics to them. Are there conversations for which there’s no topic? Are you unsure what topic applies to a Conversation? Use this to revise your Topics.
- Repeat the exercise above with a few Agents. Do they apply the right Topics to the correct Conversations? Do they find any of them confusing? Use this to revise and improve your set of Topics.
- When your list of Topics feels solid, you can create them in Gladly!
Recommendation #
For an example of what a well-designed Topic hierarchy could look like, we can look at a potential hierarchy for a hotel.
After following the process from “Designing Your Topics hierarchy,” the contact center managers determined that Customers mainly contacted them about reservations, loyalty programs, account inquiries, and technical issues. As seen in the example below, these four areas became the four different Topic hierarchies:
Reservations
- Reservations
- Reservations > New Reservations
- Reservations > Existing Reservations
- Reservations > Existing Reservations> Check In
- Reservations > Existing Reservations> Room Upgrade
- Reservations > Existing Reservations > Change Reservation
- Reservations > Existing Reservations > Cancel Reservation
- Reservations > Existing Reservations > Link to Loyalty Program
- Reservations > New Reservations > Wedding Block
Loyalty Program
- Loyalty Program
- Loyalty Program > Reset Password
- Loyalty Program > Points > Redeem
Account Inquiry
- Account Inquiry
- Account Inquiry > Billing
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Invoice Copy
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Dispute Charge
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Dispute Charge > Room Service
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Dispute Charge > Damages
Technical Issues
- Technical Issues
- Technical Issue > Website
- Technical Issue > App
In the structure above, Agents, for instance, can use Account Inquiry or Reservations because they are parent Topics. If used, this may not give you the granularity you need when analyzing the types of requests you receive from Customers since it’s reporting at the parent level. If you do not want the ability to select parent Topics, we recommend using a flat parent-child list for your Topics. A flat Topic list would look like the list below, where Agents have a granular set of options.
Reservations
- Reservations > Existing Reservations > Change Reservation
- Reservations > Existing Reservations > Cancel Reservation
- Reservations > Existing Reservations > Link to Loyalty Program
Account Inquiry
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Invoice Copy
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Dispute Charge
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Dispute Charge > Room Service
- Account Inquiry > Billing > Dispute Charge > Damages
Technical Issues
- Technical Issue > Website
- Technical Issue > App
