Play Step: Decision

Please Note: Conditional Logic for Plays is only available in the ChurnZero Enterprise Edition. Please contact your ChurnZero Customer Success Manager for pricing and edition activation. 

Using a Decision Step, you can add Conditional Logic to your Plays to allow for your Customers to go down different Paths within the same Play. Each Path has a set of decision criteria that, when met, will funnel the Account or Contact down the Path that it qualifies for.

Selected Step Details

If you are creating a One-Time Play you will have the option to determine at what date/time the decision will be made.

If it is a Continuous Play, you can determine when the Decision will be made in relation to the previous step, as well as set a maximum wait time that the Account/Contact will be kept in evaluation before being sent down the Otherwise Path. You can also make the choice to not start the wait time until the previous step completes. See "Wait Time and Path Order" section below for more information about wait time and how it impacts Decision Steps. 

Note: Conditional plays always start at the first step and do not allow entering at a specific step. Only non-conditional plays allow entering in the play at a specific step.

Decision Details

Once you have selected your wait time, you can begin setting up your Decision Paths. A Path is a branch in the Decision where you establish the desired criteria. We support up to 4 Custom Path's in one Decision Card, as well as the Otherwise Path, allowing for a maximum of 5 Paths per Decision. You will see the following settings when setting up your Decision Step:

• Path Name- Select the name you want to give to your Path. The Path Name will be helpful as your are viewing your play report, so make it clear. In the Above Example, Path 1 is named "Email Read", as the criteria for that path is that the previous email was read.
• Check For- This is going to be where you determine what the criteria will be for putting the Account/Contact down that specific Path. There are two types of decisions that can be made, Standard and Custom.
  • Standard Decision -Standard decision criteria is information that can be used to put someone down a specific Path based on another step within the same play. After you choose which type of standard decision you want to use, you will have to select which of the previous steps it relates to. 
    
    The following options are available for Standard Decisions:
    
    • Email Read- Has the selected email been marked as Read?
    • Email Clicked- Has any link been clicked? At the moment there is no ability to target if a specific link was clicked. 
    • Email Replied- Did someone reply to this email? This requires the use of our Google or Outlook integrations. 
    • Email Unsubscribed- Did someone unsubscribe from this email?
    • Email Bounced-Did the selected email bounce? If you are using your own SendGrid API key, ChurnZero will not record bounce data. 
    • Announcement Viewed- Did someone view the in app announcement?
    • Announcement Clicked- Did someone click the in app announcement?
    • Task Status- Check for a specific value in the Task Status
    • Task Overdue- Is the task due date earlier than today?
    • Task Custom Field- Check for a specific value in the Task Status

Note: For Account Targeted Plays, all decisions related to emails will apply if any contact on that email performed the action. 

• • Custom Decision- A custom decision allows you to use other information that you collected in ChurnZero to make decisions for your Play. When you choose "Custom",  you will be presented with filter criteria similar to segmentation. This is where you can add information like Account/Contact Attributes, Event Metrics and Usage, and much more!
    
• Add Condition-This allows you to add multiple conditions together for one Path. This is added as AND Criteria. For example, the account should go down Path 1 if the previous email is read AND they have a Renewal Date in the Next 90 Days
• Add Path- This is how you can add more Paths to your decision.
• Otherwise-This will be the Path the Account goes down if none of the above criteria is met upon evaluation. You can not remove, reorder, or set parameters on the Otherwise Path.

Once you have your Paths created, you can re-order them to set priority. This can be done within the Decision Details if the Path is collapsed, or by directly moving the cards!

Decision Evaluation, Wait Time, and Path Order

• Importance of Minimum Wait Time-Wait time is important to consider when setting up your Decision Step. Let's take an example where you want to base your decision off of Task Status:If your wait time was set to begin evaluating 1 Minute after the previous step, then the Contact/Account would almost immediately be funneled down the first Path, because the task status is still "Not Started". You want to give your employees enough time to finish the task, so you may want to set your Minimum Wait Time to 5 Days. So after the task is assigned, your employee would have 5 days to change the task status. On day 5, the Decision step would begin evaluation. 
• Maximum Wait Time- Maximum wait time dictates how long you give the Account/Contact time to evaluate the decision.  Once the Account/Contact enters the decision, the Play will begin to look for any qualifying Paths in order. If Path 1 is not met, it will move on to Path 2, and so on until it reaches the last custom Path.  It will keep evaluating going in order from until the maximum wait time is met. If, by that time, none of the criteria is met to go down any Custom Path, the Account/Contact will go down the "Otherwise" Path. 
• Importance of Path Order- As stated above, Decision steps are processed in sequential Path Order. So if you have 2 paths where all conditions are met, the Account/Contact will go down the Path that is ordered first. Take the below example where we are checking if an email is read or clicked:
  If a contact has both read and clicked the email, When the decision evaluates, we will first check to see if the email was read, as that is the first Path in the order. Since the condition is true, they will be sent down the "Email Read" Path. However, you most likely wanted them to go down the "Email Clicked" Path.  A good rule to follow here is put your most restrictive paths towards the top of the order. This will ensure everyone goes down the desired path.