Directly continually works to improve the way experts interact with the customers and with each other to make sure customers receive high quality answers that solve their problem. One way to accomplish that is to ensure the most helpful and knowledgeable experts get the customers’ questions first.

A new feature we released this week lets experts upvote or downvote other experts’ answers. This is an addition to the existing interaction mechanisms that all work together to inform Directly’s routing engine, which matches questions with the best experts. While experts are always encouraged to provide their own answers, with voting, they both earn points and help improve the overall quality of answers by telling the system which answers are good and which need improvement.

How it works

Instead of just picking an answer or writing their own, experts can now use “upvote” and “downvote” to express their approval or disproval for any number of existing answers, in addition to the one answer they consider the best. The buttons act as toggles so tapping them again will undo the action.

A special mention goes to the downvote button which hides the “choose answer” option and gives the expert the opportunity to flag the downvoted answer. Flagging helps moderators spot answers that need special attention and experts who may need coaching.

A big change to the Q&A interaction

It’s not often that Directly modifies the interaction model of our apps because the model is such an important component of our routing engine. With the introduction of voting, we expect to see the overall quality of the answers improve even more and the most helpful experts to get rewarded accordingly with more questions.

I am looking forward to your questions and comments. You can reach me at vlad@directly.com.