Configure topic alerts

Topic alerts trigger when feedback includes configured topics, and can assist with identifying high-stakes feedback.

Topic alerts trigger a response when the text in a survey record matches a Medallia Text Analytics topic. Topic alerts are a type of alert. The workflow for viewing and managing these alerts is the same as it is for other alerts.

Best practice for topic alerts is to support one-mention use cases—such as customer churn, potential legal issues, or compliance regulation—where a single mention in a comment is enough to warrant attention.

For example, suppose you create an alert that gets triggered every time a survey comment contains the words lawsuit and attorney within a single sentence. From then on, whenever a survey taker uses those words to threaten legal action (such as by entering I'm going to get an attorney and file a lawsuit), Medallia Experience Cloud triggers the topic alert. The alert is then routed to the appropriate people, providing the company with an opportunity to resolve the situation before it escalates into the courtroom.

Consider creating topic alerts to:

  • Improve customer retention — Proactively respond to customers that exhibit indicators of churn or negative experience drivers.

  • Quickly respond to new issues — Identify and route special incidents such as complaints or legal concerns to the appropriate teams.

  • Drive cross-sell and upsell — Alert account managers to new sales opportunities and drive accountability to follow-up.

  • Recognize employees — Surface positive customer verbatims and celebrate great experiences.

In most situations, caution your company stakeholders against using topic alerts specifically for issue routing. For example, a company might want to use alerts to assign follow-up responsibility when customers mention broad topics such as Website, Complaints, and so on. This use case can be problematic because of the high volume of comments in broad topics. Without a very clear understanding of where specific feedback should go, you risk overloading people's inboxes with too many alerts. Additionally, it can be difficult to ensure alerts are routed correctly when the associated topics are broad. Remember that to maintain accountability, a record can be assigned only one alert, and can have only one owner.

A good example of using topic alerts for issue routing is to alert a company's digital team when customers encounter a specific website issue or error. In this case, when providing feedback, customers are likely to copy-and-paste the exact error code or message text generated by the website.

Restrictions

The following restrictions apply:

  • Experience Cloud does not trigger any topic alert until text processing finishes. Since Experience Cloud evaluates alert triggers sequentially, lower priority alerts are not triggered until text processing is complete.

  • On the Reporting > Text Processing > Global Text Analytics Settings > Settings screen, Automatic Processing Enabled property must be selected.

    Note: Enabling text processing is a required step for implementing both Theme Explorer and Text Analytics, so for production instances this property is probably turned on already. However, on sandbox instances this property is turned off by default. For more information, see Sandboxes.

  • On the Reporting > Text Processing > Topic & Theme Tagging > Settings screen, the Topic Alert Blocking Enabled property must be selected.

  • You cannot add sentiment as an alert trigger.

  • If your company stops subscribing to Text Analytics, you must deactivate all topic alerts before you turn off text processing.

  • There can be only one alert instance per survey record. When a record meets the conditions for more than one alert, Experience Cloud triggers the alert with the highest priority.
    Restriction: This restriction applies to all alerts.

Create a topic alert

Follow the steps to create a topic alert.

  1. Create and publish at least one topic, as described in Topics screen.

    The topic's rules define the logic and keywords that trigger a topic alert. Work with the company to define an effective set of rules.
    Important: If you have not been trained to create topics, contact Medallia Support to request that the topic be created for you.
  2. Create a new alert (as described in Advanced alerts), and add the topic as an alert condition.

    • The condition can include multiple topics. For example, you can trigger the alert if either Topic A OR Topic B is found.

    • The condition can include multiple types of triggers. For example, you can trigger the alert if Topic A is found and Likelihood to Recommend <= 6.

    • In general, companies will want to apply the topic to all possible comment fields, so you can choose Select All.

    Tip: The topic does not appear as a trigger option until it is published.

Formula fields (K-fields) with topics in alerts

Medallia does not recommend using formula fields (also known as K-fields) that reference topics as conditions in alerts, as this may lead to inaccurate evaluations and alerts that do not trigger as expected.

Such an implementation is not recommended because
  • the alert processing engine cannot determine if the formula field calculation references a topic;
  • the formula field calculation is evaluated before text processing is complete;
  • that evaluation is not an accurate representation of the data because text processing has not been completed;
  • and this leads to unexpected outcomes such as alerts triggering incorrectly or not triggering even when configured conditions are met.

If, despite these limitations, a customer use case requires using formula fields with topics in alert conditions, a workaround is available. To delay alert condition evaluation until text processing has completed, add an auxiliary condition that directly references the topic. This auxiliary condition must be designed in such a way that it always evaluates to false; otherwise, it may affect the intended evaluation result and cause erroneous alert triggering.

Because the auxiliary topic-referencing condition must always evaluate to false, the condition operator that connects the auxiliary and primary conditions must be OR. For example:

  • Auxiliary condition (FALSE) OR primary condition (TRUE) yields a final result of TRUE, and the alert triggers.
  • Auxiliary condition (FALSE) OR primary condition (FALSE) yields a final result of FALSE, and the alert is not triggered.

If the auxiliary condition ever evaluates to TRUE, the alert triggers erroneously. If the AND operator is used to connect the auxiliary and primary conditions, the alert triggers erroneously or not at all.