4 Metrics for Monitoring the Performance of Your Self-Service Channels

Famed management consultant and researcher Peter Drucker once said, “what’s measured, improves.” While companies have long used KPIs in call centers for this reason, they haven’t had a lot of other metrics for measuring performance in other customer service channels.

FAQs, publicly-facing knowledge bases, communities and other forms of self-service provide a lot of value to companies, the primary one being deflecting tickets from the call center. Some of Hewlett Packard’s community articles are viewed as many as 1,500 times for example. While many of these page views are likely people just causally browsing, others could be from site visitors that might have called for answer in an alternative scenario.

Now that an increasing number of customers prefer these digitally-based channels, it’s time companies apply the same level of scrutiny to performance in these channels as they do in the call center. Here’s four metrics your company can use to monitor and maximize the value you get from your self-service channels.

Percent of Community Questions that Receive a Response

In order for customers to actually want to use your self-service channels, they have to believe they will actually get a response. For this reason, it’s important that you monitor the percent of community questions that receive a response—ideally this would be 100 percent.

Percent of Community Questions that Require an Employee Response

In order to ensure all of the questions in your community receive a response, you will likely need to have someone responsible for moderating the community. Several help desk systems allow you to have an alert sent to an employee if a question doesn’t receive a response from the community within a certain time frame. Over time, you will want the percent of community questions that require an employee response to fall. If it doesn’t, you might want to investigate, and perhaps add gamification and other tactics that increase engagement.

FAQ / Knowledge Base / Community Article Page Views

It’s important that you identify which topics resonate most with your customers. This will help you know which articles should be presented first, or on the front page of your communities. Knowing what’s popular will also help direct what content you should create proactively (rather than waiting until someone asks that question in the community). Monitoring page views across all of your self-service channels will help you identify your most active content themes.

Trends Among ‘Question Types’ in Email, Chat, Phone Support

While this is a metric for monitoring non-self-service channels, the information from it will be used to improve self-service performance. Let’s say you just released a new product. You might all of the sudden get an influx of calls regarding set-up, or other questions about using it. Your team should tag these issues by type. As you get an influx of a particular issue type, this could trigger the self-service team to proactively create articles around that solution.

These are just a few of the metrics that are likely possible for monitoring self-service performance. What KPIs have you found most successful? Join the conversation with a comment here.

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