FREE GUIDE
The ultimate Support Tagging Taxonomy Guide
Every support ticket leaves a trail of insight. Whilst most support teams tag tickets to track contact reasons and customer issues, very few have a solid taxonomy which leads to inaccurate reporting.
This guide will help you build a rock-solid tag taxonomy so you can get deeper and more actionable customer insights than ever before.
In this guide you'll find:
- Introduction to different types of tag taxonomies
- Step-by-step guide for creating your own taxonomy
- Free Tag Taxonomy template (with examples)
- Comparison of manual vs automated tagging methods
The Guide
pART 1
Why you need a strong tag taxonomy
Whether you are tagging your customer feedback manually or use an automated tagging tool, you will need to build a robust tag taxonomy to act as an overarching framework and help you organize and understand your tagged data.
Tagging without a tag taxonomy will have you end up with a long list of overlapping and redundant tags that are hard to apply, difficult to synthesize and draw insight from consistently.
A bit of upfront planning can go a long way in ensuring that your tagging efforts pay off in the form of more accurate reporting that you can rely on when making decisions around your customer experience.
Strong taxonomy
- Enables you to accurately track contact reasons
- Helps monitor and prioritize recurring customer issues
- Tag reporting is accurate, coherent and actionable
Weak Taxonomy
- Makes it difficult for agents to choose the right tags
- Tag reporting lacks structure and is hard to action
- Leaves you with blind spots around customer issues
pART 2
A brief introduction to taxonomies
Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization based on discrete sets and finds its roots in the Greek language τάξις, taxis (meaning ‘order’, ‘arrangement’) and νόμος, nomos (‘law’ or ‘science’). In general, it refers to a categorization of things or concepts such as species of animals, food groups and plants.
In this guide, we are going to talk specifically about building a tag taxonomy to help you break down and organize customer feedback into logical concepts to help people in your organization understand what matters to your customers the most.
There are two popular types of tag taxonomies used for feedback analysis – flat and hierarchical
Option one
Flat Taxonomy
Benefits
- Easy to build the initial taxonomy
- Tags can be applied to feedback more consistently and accurately as there are fewer tags to choose from
- Great in situations where the data volume is relatively low
Drawbacks
- Difficult to compare tags as they can differ in their level of abstraction
- Can become unwieldy when used with a large number of tags
- Difficult to expand without creating duplication or overlapping tags
Option Two
Hierachical Taxonomy
A hierarchical taxonomy allows a hierarchical arrangement of tags. Individual tags within the hierarchy are arranged in order of abstraction. Moving up the hierarchy means expanding the tag or concept. Moving down the hierarchy means refining the tag or concept.
Benefits
- Offers a greater level of detail as more specific tags can be created
- Allows flexible reporting at each level of the hierarchy
- Easy to expand as new tags fall neatly within pre-existing categories and new categories can be created
Drawbacks
- It takes some deliberate planning to create a logical hierarchical structure
- It might be challenging to change and reorganize tags in a drastically different structure once the hierarchy is established
Your choice
Which tag taxonomy is right for my company?
Your choice of tag taxonomy will mainly come down to your support ticket volume.
- If your volume is low (hundreds of tickets per month), you might be better off sticking to a flat taxonomy and keeping your tag list short;
- If your volume is high (thousands of tickets per month), then your best bet is to go with a hierarchical tag taxonomy and expand your list of tags for more detailed reporting.
PART 3
How to build your own tag taxonomy
Now that we got the theory out of the way, let's dive in and start building your taxonomy.
STEP 1
Download our free tag taxonomy template
We have created a free tag taxonomy template for you to plan and build your new taxonomy.
STEP 2
Define the high level tag categories
When building a tag taxonomy, it’s best to start by mapping out the high-level categories first. For your first level tags, think about the broad areas your customer feedback tends to fall into.
If your data volume is low and you are only limited to a flat single-level tag taxonomy by your tool, I would recommend sticking with only the top-level tags.
On the other hand, if you have a high volume, read on to learn how to build the second and third tier of your hierarchical tag taxonomy.
eCommerce example:
- Order Queries
- Delivery Queries
- Product Issues
- Product Questions
- Product Requests
SaaS example:
- User Education
- Technical Issues
- Usability Issues
- Feature Requests
- Billing
STEP 3
Define specific tags for each category
Now that we have defined our first level of the tag hierarchy, the next step is to break down each first level tag into more specific tags.
Taking the SaaS example again, a typical breakdown might look like an example on the right.
STEP 4
Break down your tags for more granular insight
The first two tagging levels will already provide you with a lot of detail about the various topics discussed in your customer feedback. However, to get even more in-depth insights, you can then break-down each second level tag into more specific third level tags.
Continuing from the previous SaaS company example, here is an illustration of how the third level tag breakdown might look like.
STEP 5
Decide between manual and automated tagging
In the early stages, when the customer feedback volume is relatively low, it can be relatively straightforward to manually tag incoming customer feedback based on a tight flat tag taxonomy.
However, as you scale, add more customer support agents and expand teams that need to learn from and act based on customer insights, the manual tagging process often breaks down. That’s when you might want to consider investing in an automated ticket tagging tool like Prodsight.
Manual Tagging
- No need for any additional tools or software
- Some complex issues might be tagged more accurately by a human agent
- Inconsistencies in tagging quality between agents
- Poor coverage as conversations get untagged
- Time consuming and can slow your agents down
Automated tagging
- Saves time and money by automating the ticket tagging
- Can tag tickets retrospectively for better insights
- Can incorporate reviews, NPS and other customer feedback
- Cost can be prohibitive for early stage startups
- Often requires some initial training and setup
These brands have already automated ticket tagging
It's time to put tagging on auto-pilot
- Takes less than 60 seconds to connect your account
- Concierge-style onboarding to help you make the switch
- GRPR-compliant with top-grade security and privacy