Experience Building Best Practices

So your company has purchased Qualified – and you’re ready for your customers to arrive on your website and have bespoke, tailored experiences. But - how exactly do you get started hot routing your accounts with open opportunities directly to a live person? How exactly can you ensure visitors from paid advertising campaigns answer qualification questions first? It’s all in how you build experiences.

First, know that your Qualified Success Architect is always standing by and ready to offer guidance – but, we’ve learned a few things along the way and it can be helpful to read some best practices before you start to dig in.

We highly recommend checking out our library of strategies and use-cases here. It’s a great starting point for understanding the experiences we’ve found to be successful. Almost all of our customers have at least one of the experiences listed.

What Are Experiences?

Before we start creating experiences together, let’s define exactly what an experience is. An experience is what a visitor sees when they come to your website. It’s the customized journey your customers are met with upon arrival based on the known data you already have. These can include an on-brand greeting, a chatbot with qualification questions relevant to your business, direct routing to a human for inbound live chat or outbound pouncing, and more. The possibilities are endless! (Okay, maybe there is an end… but we haven’t found it and it’s nowhere in sight!)

It’s important to know though – by creating these custom experiences, you’re actually tackling two things at once: you’re controlling the visitor experience on your website as well as how the sales rep interacts with Qualified behind the scenes.

Experience Types

It’s possible to design two types of experiences in Qualified: automatic experiences and manually-created experiences. 

An automatic experience is one that you can trigger without any other action from your visitor on any page of your site. These experiences (and the associated triggers) are evaluated every time a person arrives on your website.

‍A manual experience is triggered by a smart form or button on your site. For example, you might configure a smart “contact us” button to trigger a manual experience routing to the right sales rep! The experience is driven by the click of the button or the form submission. You can learn more on how to create these types of experiences in our Smart Buttons and Smart Forms articles.

As you’re building experiences, you may find yourself building the same things over and over again.  Introducing Blocks. Blocks are collections of steps inside an experience – in fact, with blocks, there is a bit of “experienception” going on. Blocks are an easy way to package together repeatable steps or actions that you want to use across a large number of experiences. A great use for a block might be qualification questions.

Once you start managing large numbers of experiences at once, blocks will prove very helpful in ensuring the correct steps are triggered and they’ll also make updating your many bespoke experiences much easier.

Building Your Experiences

‍Prior to building an experience, you’ll want to keep 2 things in mind: triggers and outcome.

Let’s start with triggers: you may want to have a specific experience triggered when a visitor is on a specific page or if they meet a certain criteria such as having an open opportunity or being an account your sales or marketing team wants to target. You may even want this experience triggered for a specific group of visitors, known as a segment.

An experience trigger provokes the launch of an experience. Experiences can be triggered off a number of different criteria from page view, current page, referrer, UTM parameter, segments, a field in SFDC, location/device, visit count or information identified via Reverse IP. The trigger defines the conditions a web visitor must meet to receive a certain experience.

You’ll also want to ensure that each experience has a specific business objective. Once you’ve defined your experience trigger, you’ll want to focus on what the end-goal should be: what do you want this visitor to do by the end of the experience? Book a meeting? Navigate to a specific page? Provide answers to their qualification questions? Ensure your experience has the necessary steps to drive the outcome or end goal that you’ve defined.

Note that experiences can be easily duplicated. You could create a specific experience for a high-intent page such as pricing, duplicate it and make some tweaks to have a specific experience for another high-intent page such as your demo booking page.

Now, Let’s Talk Branching

Experience branching is one of the most important pieces to experience building, because it’s what sends different visitors to different places based on something about them, information they’ve provided or a picklist choice they’ve selected.

We highly recommend creating experiences using Custom Questions. By asking a question, you can use the answer to that question to drive branching. An example would be a visitor selecting: “Chat with a Live Person” instead of “Learn more about our product”. You can then use that answer to the custom question to send the visitor on a different path.

When creating custom questions, note that the order of options you present to the visitor is important. You’ll want the first answer to be the action you’re trying to drive – you wouldn’t want visitors to search forever to learn how to chat with a live rep or to book a demo. You’ll want to ensure it’s front and center and drives a clear call-to-action.

By selecting a “Route for Inbound Chat” step in the experience builder, Qualified will automatically create branching logic. If a rep is available, the experience will route for chat. If a rep is not available or does not respond to the inbound chat in a specific window of time, the experience will route to a meeting booker. This is one way in which experiences can drive different outcomes.

Testing Your Experiences

Once you've completed your experience, you’ll want to test it from start to finish before making it active for your visitors. We recommend using testing parameters to test your experience (by toggling the experience on) and then removing the testing parameters, but keeping the experience on – making the experience live on your website.

Important Notes About Your Experiences

Before we leave you off to build experiences to your heart's desire, there’s a few best practices to make you aware of:

• The beauty of Qualified experiences is that they are designed for your visitors and help make their website visit contextually relevant. Rather than a generic chatbot message on every page, ensure you’re using different experiences and leveraging known information to provide them with a unique experience, leveraging all the data you have access to.
• We highly recommend starting each visitor experience with a “Route for Pounce” step. This will ensure that your sales reps can “see” each visitor in Qualified and ensure they are routed to the correct reps for inbound or outbound chatting.

More questions about building experiences? Chat with a member of our team below!