Community Metrics for Support

As Support develops community channels it must consider how to measure the impact of these strategies. This article introduces a few metrics to consider.

Community Metrics for Support

Here are the community measurement practices for Support

Active Forums and Channels

• The number of distinct sites where your products and service-related issues are discussed in an active and ongoing way.

May include social planforms, your own discussion forums, or those hosted by third parties (e.g. product user groups, professional associations, publications, etc.).

Thread Density

• The proportion of discussion threads that include topics directly related to your products or services. Density may be as high as 100% if an active forum is dedicated to your product.

Customer Engagement

• The percent of the customer base that actively uses the community.

This indicates the extent to which the entire installed base for a specific product line or brand uses a community (e.g. if individuals from 100 companies out of a total installed base of 1,000 companies use a forum the Customer Engagement rate is 10%).

Entitlement

• The percent of community users that are entitled to access assisted support (e.g. they are covered by an active support contract).

This is the percent of the “engaged customers” that are entitled to request assisted support.  How many “social” users can you identify that also have access to receive assisted support from your team.

High Severity

• The extent to which topics of high/critical severity are discussed.

High Severity of 5% indicates that at least 5 percent of the discussions about your products relate to issues that impeded the user’s ability to successfully use a key product feature and/or to use the product to support a critical business function.  You can align this metric with your own severity level definitions.  Note: Social channels are typically not great channels for getting support for high severity issues.

Deflection

• The rate that existing threads successfully resolve customer issues to the point where issues are resolved without engaging assisted support resources.

For a definition of deflection see the article titled: How to Define and Measure Deflection

New vs. Known

• The rate that new topics related to your products are being discussed but have not been previously reported to Support.

If 20% of issues discussed through the community are unfamiliar and no solution has been developed the “New Rate” is 20%.

If the remaining 80% of issues are familiar, or known, the “Known Rate is 80%.” A high known Rate indicates that you have a greater opportunity to resolve these issues through self-help channels.

Topic Coverage

• The rate that topics discussed within the community are fully documented by a “known” answer (KB article, instructional video, prior discussion thread, etc.).

If 30% of issues discussed through the community can be resolved by a previously documented answer to an issue from the knowledge base or other discussion thread, then the “Topic Coverage Rate” rate is 30%.  Ideally most of not all of these topics will be resolved by previously documented and shared knowledge.

Knowledge Gap

• The extent to which topics discussed within the community are not addressed within the knowledge base or by other shared knowledge resources.

The “New Rate” indicates the rate that issues discussed within the community or social channels cannot be answered by existing knowledge base articles.

Sentiment

• The general tone of the active forum as it relates to customer / user feelings about your products and services.

A sentiment score is typically calculated by using a text analytics tool designed to extract customer “feelings” from the text of a community post.  

To learn more about measuring customer sentiment and satisfaction check out Best Practices for Developing Customer Insights.