When you create a help center for your customers, you’re providing them with a self-service channel to solve their own problems instead of opening tickets. This helps you to scale your customer support organization because it can result in fewer requests for support that your agents must handle and fewer tickets, (known asticket deflection).
This article introduces the tools and metrics that work together to build and then measure the effectiveness of your self-service channel. To get the most out of this article, you should already provide your customers with self-service content using Guide so that you have some user activity to measures.
- Analyzing knowledge base metrics
- Analyzing search engagement metrics
- Monitoring your help center traffic and activity with Google Analytics
- Calculating your self-service score
- Tracking Knowledge Capture app use of knowledge base content and solved tickets
- Tracking Answer Bot automated ticket resolution
- A summary of your self-service channel reporting options
Analyzing knowledge base engagement metrics
Analyzing knowledge base activity begins in the Reporting dashboard in Zendesk Support. In the dashboard, administrators can measure essential engagement metrics for the knowledge base.
What is the tool and where to find it
The Knowledge Base tab in the Reporting dashboard in Zendesk Support. To open the Knowledge Base dashboard, in Support, click the Reporting icon (
在侧边栏,然后单击Knowledge Base tab.
Plan requirements
Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide
Which channels can you filter by
Your knowledge base content is in your help center, of course, but you can also present your knowledge base content in the Web Widget (Classic), along with other support features on your website or by using the Mobile SDK to embed your knowledge base and support features into apps.
The Knowledge Base dashboard shows all of your knowledge base activity. If you've extended your knowledge base content into other self-service channels, such as the Web Widget (Classic) or Mobile SDK, you can view your analytics as a whole or by specific channel.
- Help center
- Mobile SDK
- Web Widget (Classic)
What you can learn
- ViewsThe total number of views for articles in the knowledge base during the reporting period. This can help you understand which content users are interacting with and using to solve issues.
- Votes- The total number of Up and Down votes that were applied to your help center articles. You can view the total number of votes or either by Up or Down votes only. This is a good way to track how your customers feel about your content. You’ll want to review the articles that received Down votes to see how to improve them.
- Subscriptions- The number of customers who have chosen to follow articles in your help center so that they can receive email updates when comments are added. It’s a good measure of engagement and many customers who have expertise in specific areas use this to engage your community of users and provide them with help. Adding a comment to an article is a great way to let followers know it's been updated.
- Comments——被添加到文章的评论s when customers need more information or a clarification about the information you’ve provided them. This is a good way to enrich your knowledge base with more detail and unexpected use cases. It’s also a good way to help customers before they submit a support request—deflecting the creation of support tickets.
Analyzing search engagement metrics
If your customers can’t find the information they’re looking for in your help center, your self-service channel will be of little help to them. The Search dashboard, on the Reporting dashboard in Support, is where you’ll find metrics that help you track what your customers are searching for and what actions they take after searching for answers.
What is the tool and where to find it
The Search tab in the Reporting dashboard in Zendesk Support. To open the Search dashboard, in Support, click the Reporting icon (在侧边栏,然后单击Search tab.
Plan requirements
Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide
What you can learn
For search, it's important to know what your customers are looking for. To understand that, look at the following metrics.
- Searches with no results- This is the number of searches that had no results. In other words, there was nothing in your knowledge base or community that contained the search keywords. These might indicate of course that you need to create content that covers those searches, label your articles with relevant search terms, or it could mean that you need to spend some time making sure you and your customers use the same terms.
- Searches with no clicks- This is the number of searches that had results, but none of those results were clicked into. This metric most likely indicates either your articles aren’t needed, or more likely, that their titles need to be revised so that customers have a better understanding of their content.
- 票s created after search- This is the number of times that customers created a support request immediately after searching your help center. This is probably the most important of three metrics because it’s a strong indication that the content provided wasn’t enough to help the customer solve their problem on their own. This could also indicate a trouble spot with the product—that customers are having difficulty using it even with sufficient self-service content.
Monitoring help center traffic and activity with Google Analytics
Just as with any other website, you can monitor and analyze the traffic and activity in your help center using Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides industry-standard metrics for website traffic, user activity, and user engagement. Used together with the Reporting dashboard in Support, which gives you a snapshot of essential activity data, Google Analytics helps you to dig much deeper into important user activity and engagement metrics.
Although these metrics can’t tell you how many tickets have been deflected by using your help center, they do provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the use and effectiveness of the content in your help center.
What is the tool and where to find it
The Google Analytics integration with Zendesk Guide. You need toset up Google Analytics for Guide, then you can track your help center activity in your Google Analytics account.
Plan requirements
All plans, with Google Analytics enablede
What you can learn
- Page views——这是ce的页面浏览数你的帮助nter. You can track views in both Google Analytics and in the Knowledge Base reporting tab in Zendesk Support.
- Unique page views- This is the number of unique visitors to your help center. Each visit to your help center counts as a session, and each session (usually), results in multiple page views. Tracking the number of users visiting your help center gives you some perspective about its use compared to the total number of views in a specified period. A monthly views total of 10,000 compared to 1000 unique users within that same period tells you that those users are viewing on average 10 pages per session. This helps you understand how many of your customers use your self-service content.
- % New Sessions- Understanding how many new versus returning users visit your help center helps you focus on the content that addresses the needs of those users. For example, rolling out a new product may result in a spike of new users, which you can address by providing the information needed to use the new product.
- Average session duration- The average duration of a user session in your help center tells you how much time they spend in your help center and, if you drill down deeper, how much time they spend reading specific articles and FAQs. Ideally, they spend enough time to read through the information you provided them. If they don’t, that tells you something as well—that perhaps your content is not engaging or is not the information they need.
- Pages per session- This is the average number of pages viewed during a session on your help center. Once again, this tells you how much of your self-service content is being used.
- Bounce rate- This is the percentage of single-page sessions in your help center. A bounce means that the customer left your help center after viewing the first page that they landed on. A user may have visited the help center unintentionally, or didn’t like what they saw when they got there.
With Google Analytics, you can also analyze what users are searching for and what actions they take after those searches.
Learn more
- 谷歌分析and your help center - Part 1: Asking the right questions
- 谷歌分析and your help center - Part 2: Measuring the effectiveness of search
- 谷歌分析and your help center - Part 3: Tracking customers' actions
- 谷歌分析and your help center - Part 4: Fine-tuning your help center
- 谷歌分析and your help center - Part 5: Capturing help center user data
Calculating your self-service score
To begin more directly quantifying the effectiveness of your help center as a self-service channel, and its impact on ticket deflection, you may want to determine what yourself-service scoreis. This metric is also known as the self-service ratio and it’s a manual calculation you can make using this formula:
Self-service score = Total user sessions of your help center(s) / Total users in tickets
- Set up Google Analytics account and connect it to Guide as described inEnabling Google Analytics for your help center.
- When you have several months of user activity available, in Google Analytics take a 30 day snapshot (for example), of the number of unique visitors to your help center.
- Divide that number by the total number of users who have submitted tickets in that same time period. To determine what that number is you need to create an Explore query using theD_COUNT(Requesters)metric with a票created - datefilter for the months you want to report on. For help, seeGetting started creating queries.
When making this calculation, you may also want to define what you consider to be active use of your help center in an attempt to self-serve. In6步骤测量自助服务成功, Erin Cochran of RJMetrics says “We defined ‘content interaction’ as someone who did more than just visit the help center landing page or navigate straight to a new ticket form. This allowed us to get a better idea of how many visitors were actually trying to self-serve before submitting a ticket.” Erin shares other useful tips for evaluating self-service in her article — give it a look.
Tracking Knowledge Capture app use of knowledge base content and solved tickets
The Knowledge Capture app enables agents to easily share and direct customers to knowledge base content, to help customers solve their support issues themselves.
There’s manual intervention needed here because agents add the links to knowledge base content into their replies to customers, but you can then track if the use of the link to the content helped the user solve their own ticket. Tickets aren’t deflected in this case, but their resolution may be the result of the use of your self-service channel.
What is the tool and where to find it
The Knowledge Capture dashboard in Zendesk Explore. To open the dashboard, in Explore, select the Zendesk Guide dashboard then click the Knowledge Capture tab.
Plan requirements
Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide
Learn more
Tracking Answer Bot automated ticket resolution
Answer Bot uses machine learning to scan the text of incoming support requests and then automatically responds to tickets with a list of relevant knowledge base articles that may help your customers resolve their issues without having to interact with an agent.
Like the Knowledge Capture app, you can view analytics for Answer Bot activity in Zendesk Explore and, most importantly, you can see how many tickets were solved using your knowledge base articles.
This includes overall performance (how many times the links resolve tickets), and also the performance of individual articles, (which articles are the best and worst at helping customers solve their problems).
What is the tool and where to find it
The Answer Bot dashboard in Zendesk Explore. To open the dashboard, in Explore, select the Zendesk Guide dashboard then click the Answer Bot tab.
Plan requirements
Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide with Answer Bot.
Learn more
A summary of your self-service channel reporting options
| Reporting tool | Plan requirements | Location of reports |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Base dashboard | Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide | Knowledge Base tab in the Reporting dashboard in Support |
| Search dashboard | Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide | Search tab in the Reporting dashboard in Support |
| 谷歌分析 | All plans, with Google Analytics enabled | 谷歌分析dashboard |
| Knowledge Capture app dashboard | Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide | Knowledge Capture tab in the Guide dashboard in Explore |
| Answer Bot dashboard | Any Suite plan, except Suite Team, or Support + Guide with Answer Bot | Answer Bot tab in the Guide dashboard in Explore |
18 Comments
Is there an option in Explore to add a self service measurement? I don't see anything like that as available reports but could we build that calculation?
Hi Kate!
Technically yes, that would be correct. But if you're looking for a report, in order for you to track those; then you may use the documentation below as reference.
Analyzing your Knowledge Capture activity
Explore recipe: Analyzing Knowledge Capture activity
According to this article, the page views and unique page views can be tracked in Google Analytics or in the report, but our figures do not match up. There's a difference by the thousands! Is anyone else having this problem?
Which did you find most reliable? We're trying to measure the impact of our Help Center and these measurements are key to our understanding.
Im with Jessica C on this. I am seeing a variation in numbers between Zendesk and Google.
Also, we use a non-Zendesk chatbot, and curious about how we are accurately able to track clicks? If they are clicking article links through a chatbot, how can we tell how the customer is getting to each article?
I agree with Wade and Jessica, our Zendesk Article Views and Google Page Views number is off by thousands. Would be interested in hearing more about why this is? It definitely can change the outcome of the Self Service Score.
Danejust following up -- any suggestions?
When it comes to self-service, the first thing that comes to mind is Answer Bot resolution. If this is the case, please refer toExplore recipe: Answer Bot attempts through to resolutions. However, if this cannot be applied on your use case, please provide more context on your use case.
I am going to open a ticket with you so we can investigate this further.
You will receive an email shortly.
基于这些信息,只是想澄清,that in using the knowledge capture tool to link articles to customer tickets we can essentially track issues that could have been self-serviced but weren't, correct? Along for content improvements, of course.
It seems that you have already submitted a ticket for this inquiry. Please continue to work with the Advocate assigned to the ticket so that you can be assisted more efficiently.
I agree withJessica Peck- is there a way to build this metric in Explore?
Normally the discrepancy is caused by how Explore and Google calculate views. In Explore, HTTP user directly accessing the API stats view endpoint of those articles are also being counted. Our Explore system counting method does associate this with views, however, Google Analytics won't as it wasn't actually a real visit on the page.
If you want to check the real page visit, Google Analytics is more reliable. This is currently being discussed on how to avoid this type of behaviour in the future, but we do not have a near-term resolution for now.
HiDanewould you be able to provide me a step by step instructions how to create a formula in Zendesk explore which would calculate self-service ratio and gave me the e.g. 40:1, 4:1 result?
I was able to create 2 separate queries, but I am stuck and I can't make them work together because they are from 2 different datasets.
Thanks for your help.
hi Christophe. About the search dashboard. On the helpcenter (of funda.nl) it says I have 0.0% clickthroughrate. Google analytics tells a different story. Any clue why this is happening?
The mobile SDK is showing figures on the CTR.
when I go to the Search tab, I see the search stats for 'no clicks' and 'no results'. when I run the CSV from the top of that page, the data doesn't match. Several of the responses don't show on the CSV but they are on the list on in the reported data on that page.
The picture disappeared shortly after uploading the guide, it's very weird
HiJennifer Rowe,Dane-- can we calculate self-service metrics using Zendesk reporting alone? Since Google Analytics is phasing out, we want to ensure we're calculating these metrics using a sustainable future-proof process. Thanks!
HiMary Jane Reese,
Since you posted, we made available a search dashboard and a search dataset. You can find more information about this in the following article
We recommend using it.
However, if the issue you encountered is about results before October 15, 2021 (that are not in Explore), please let me know so I can open a ticket on your behalf to investigate further.
Pleasesign into leave a comment.