URL selection

Always-on surveys should be available to customers throughout the entire site. Intercept surveys should be included on specific URLs. Decide which URLs trigger an intercept survey and which URLs are excluded from intercept surveys.

There are key areas where an intercept survey can be used to provide a better understanding of customer experience.

Behavioral Intercept

• On the exit ramp — Analytics can provide information on which pages have high abandonment rates; use an Abandonment Intercept to find out why.

• Abandoned at checkout — Invite feedback with an Abandonment Intercept to find out why a checkout process has come to a halt.

• Abandonment of self-service activity — Invite feedback about why a process or action might not be as easy to complete without direct help from a support agent.

• Point of success — Congratulations, the sale's complete! Now, while the experience is fresh in customers' minds, use an Intercept to collect timely feedback about the process.

General Intercept

• On the fence — Invite visitors who linger on a page beyond a set number of minutes to give feedback and use their responses to personalize interactions.

• Payment and shipping — Offer feedback on payment and shipping surveys to help customers who get stuck filling them out.

Always-on

Medallia recommends making feedback buttons available across the entire site. Include the following key areas:

• Heavy media content — Place feedback buttons prominently near media so that customers can report technical issues and get assistance (e.g., high-resolution graphic loading slowly).

• Product pages — Place feedback buttons next to products to gather feedback for on-site reviews.

• Near recommendations engine suggestions — Gather feedback about how customers view the suggestions (helpful, neutral, or even objectionable).

• UX testing and benchmarking — Gather feedback on soon-to-be-replaced sites and the sites that replace them as well as other areas where you are conducting A/B testing.

• Self-service areas — Enable customers to report issues if they can’t find the self-assist options they need.

Certain online activities that customers are involved in should be avoided with targeting. These can vary by vertical. The following chart lists best practices for URLs to avoid.

Specifying URLs

When using URLs for metadata based targeting, how you specify the URL in Digital Command Center depends on the structure of site you are integrating into. For example, suppose a company is integrating Digital into their web site at the domain www.example.com, and they have URLs that contain a shop path, and the products have URLs with the category they belong to, such as fruit and veg. The URLs in a web browser would contain paths such as:

• www.example.com/shop
• www.example.com/shop/food
• www.example.com/shop/food/fruit
• www.example.com/shop/food/veg

To target an invite triggered survey based on a URL, use the Include visitors on the following URLs option. For example, to target on pages under the shop path, specify the whole URL - www.example.com/shop. This would include any pages under the /shop path segment, such as pages under the food, fruit and veg path segments.

When targeting using URLs, what you specify is considered a "begins with" type of search. You specify the first part of a URL, and any further path segments are automatically matched by the search. Suppose the shop's products have URLs such as:

• www.example.com/shop/food/fruit/apple.html
• www.example.com/shop/food/fruit/pear.html
• www.example.com/shop/food/veg/carrot.html
• www.example.com/shop/food/veg/potato.html

You do not have to list all possible URLs, instead to target a survey on all food pages, use a URL such as www.example.com/shop/food to match all URLs under the food category, such as the fruit and veg path segments. Use the Exclude visitors on the following URLs option to specify URLs which should not be targeted. This relies on what is targeted by the Include visitors on the following URLs option. For example to not include the fruit pages but target all other food pages, use a URL such as www.example.com/shop/food/ for Include visitors on the following URLs and a URL such as www.example.com/shop/food/fruit for Exclude visitors on the following URLs. For simple Digital integrations this is standard usage.

Relative paths

More advanced integrations that require targeting different URLs can take advantage of relative paths, which start with a "/" (forward slash) character. Using relative paths reduces the amount of text required for configuring Digital and in the event of changing domains means that URLs do not have to be changed. Relative paths rely on a common domain as the base of the URL, which is always the path where the Digital embed code is running. Medallia recommend using a tag manager to deploy the Digital embed code at the root of the site. This makes it available to all pages, at any URLs.

In the following examples, assume that the Digital embed code is deployed to www.example.com. All relative URLs are therefore relative to that domain.

• To target a survey on all of the food pages, use the relative URL /shop/food.
• To target a survey on all fruit pages, use the relative URL /shop/food/fruit, which would not match any URL in the /veg path segment.

Multiple surveys can be published for a Digital property, and they all rely on the same embed code and therefore relative path. For example, to target an invitation survey on pages under the food path segment, use the relative URL /shop/food; and to target an always-on button survey on all www.example.com/help pages, use the relative URL /help.

Intercept targeting

Intercept configuration is relevant for General Intercept surveys and Behavioral Intercept surveys. Create intercepts in Digital using invite triggered surveys.

General Intercept surveys can be targeted based on website or app metrics, such as the average time in session, the number of pages viewed in a session, and the amount of time on a page. It is important to obtain this data for your website or app and to use it to decide when to intercept.

Medallia recommends intercepting customers at the two-thirds mark of their average interaction times. For example, if a customer spends 30 seconds on average on a specific page, Medallia recommends intercepting that customer after 20 seconds. Alternatively, if a customer visits eight pages on average per session, Medallia recommends intercepting after the fifth page.

Behavioral Intercept surveys can be targeted based on customer behavior. For site abandonment, Medallia recommends triggering a survey when a customer's cursor is 5px away from the top bar, which is where that customer would need to go to end the session.

Quarantine

In addition to determining when customers should be intercepted, it is important to consider how often they are asked to provide feedback. To ensure customers not be presented with too many surveys, both the Behavioral Intercept and General Intercept surveys use the following best practice quarantine rules:

• Customers cannot be re-targeted within at least 90 days after submitting feedback.

• If customers have declined survey invites, they cannot be re-targeted for 21 days after the initial invite.

Digital surveys are auto-configured to prevent customers from being targeted more than once per session. These settings are configurable based on the trigger type.

Sample volume

For Intercept surveys, determine the percentage of customers to intercept. This configuration can be updated in Digital Command Center on a survey's Targeting tab, and customers generally find the optimized volume after a process of trial and error. Review your analytics or session metrics to determine a starting point.

The following table provides an example.