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