Getting started with self-service - Part 6: Tracking essential self-service metrics

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<a href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5411234991258-plan" rel="noopener" target="_blank">What's my plan?</a>
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<p id="docs-ai-summary-content">Track essential self-service metrics to understand your help center's performance. Calculate your self-service score to measure ticket deflection, connect Google Analytics for detailed insights on user engagement, and use activity dashboards to analyze knowledge base, search, and community activity. This helps identify content gaps, improve article quality, and enhance user experience by monitoring views, votes, comments, and search results.</p>
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<p class="sidenav-heading">Articles in the series</p>
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<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408885576346">Introduction: Elements of a self-service channel</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408886455578">Part 1: Planning your self-service content project</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408883389338">Part 2: Planning your self-service content structure</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408894140826">Part 3: Determining what articles you need to create</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408887322522">Part 4: Writing your knowledge base articles</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408885574298">Part 5: Launching your help center</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408894139930">Part 6: Tracking essential self-service metrics</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="nav-link" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408882663194">Part 7: Maintaining and improving your knowledge base</a></li>
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<p class="p">With your help center live (see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408885574298" target="_blank">Getting started with self-service - Part 6: Launching your help
center</a>), you should now start tracking the key self-service metrics that will help
you determine how your help center is being used, how useful your articles are, and how you’re
doing delivering self-service.</p>
<p class="p">This article covers the following topics:</p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic-1__ul_kxc_w53_x4b">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_hz2_nhd_jmb">Calculating your self-service score</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_gfb_tsj_x4b">Connecting Google Analytics to your help center</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_lff_zsj_x4b">Using the help center activity dashboards</a></li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title2" class="topic nested1" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title2">Calculating your self-service score</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">The success of your help center can be measured in a number of ways. You of
course want to monitor the uptake in the use of your help center; how many views and users
you’re getting per month. You should see an increase based on your efforts to promote your
new self-service channel. </p>
<p class="p">You can also compare your number of help center users to the number of tickets
that were created in the same period of time. This is referred to as the <em class="ph i">self-service
score</em> (it’s also known as the <em class="ph i">self-service ratio</em> and the <em class="ph i">ticket deflection
ratio</em>). </p>
<p class="p">Self-service score = Total user sessions of your help center(s) / Total users in
tickets</p>
<p class="p">This formula gives you a ratio such as 4:1, meaning that for every four customers
who attempt to solve their own issues using self-service, one customer submits a support
request. Success here is demonstrated by an increasingly large ratio (for example, for every
40 users only one of them submits a ticket - 40:1 ratio). </p>
<div class="p">
<strong class="ph b">To calculate your self-service score</strong><ol class="ol" id="topic_hz2_nhd_jmb__ol_lxk_krz_pzb">
<li class="li">When you have several months of user activity available in Zendesk or Google
Analytics, take a 30-day snapshot (for example) of the number of visitor sessions in
your help center.</li>
<li class="li">Divide that number by the total number of users who have submitted tickets in that
same time period. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408819207706" target="_blank">Explore recipe: Finding how many users submit tickets each
month</a>.</li>
</ol>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3" class="topic nested1" id="topic_gfb_tsj_x4b">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title3">Connecting Google Analytics to your help center</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Your help center is like any other website in that you want to measure, in as much detail
as possible, how it’s being used and where it needs to be improved. After you’ve <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828643098" target="_blank">enabled Google Analytics for your help center</a>, you can begin to
analyze traffic, user engagement, and other typical website metrics. Google Analytics is a
third-party, non-Zendesk service.</p>
<p class="p">Some of the metrics that you can consider tracking in Google Analytics include the
following:</p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_gfb_tsj_x4b__ul_gwx_5sj_x4b">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Users</strong> - Aside from helping you calculate your self-service score, the
users metric also shows you the pages your visitors are accessing during their sessions,
which gives you a fuller picture of how they’re engaging with your content.
</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Avg. Session Duration</strong> - A low average session duration may indicate
that your visitors are not engaging with your content.
</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">% New Sessions</strong> - This metric gives you insight into how many of your
visitors are returning or new, which can help you determine the type of content you need
to focus on (for example, providing more getting started content for new users).
</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Bounce Rate</strong> - A high bounce rate on your landing pages (category and
section pages with the listings of your articles) could indicate that you either aren’t
providing the content they need or that your article titles need to be improved.
</li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title4" class="topic nested1" id="topic_lff_zsj_x4b">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title4">Using the help center activity dashboards</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Help center activity is tracked and available in prebuilt dashboards. Activity is tracked
for your knowledge base articles, search, Knowledge activity, and your community (if
enabled).</p>
<p class="p"><img class="image" id="topic_lff_zsj_x4b__image_vs4_jlt_qwb" src="https://zen-marketing-documentation.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/en/explore_guide_db_tabs.png" width="600"></p>
<p class="p">The data you’ll find in these three dashboards help you to analyze and improve how your
help center and your content is performing. While all the data is interesting and important,
several of them are good indicators that you need to make changes to your knowledge base
content.</p>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title5" class="topic nested2" id="topic_of5_dtj_x4b">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title5">Knowledge Base activity</h3>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Statistics on this dashboard include the number of articles created,
article views, and the total number of votes, subscriptions, and comments. Of these,
article views, votes, and comments are of particular importance. </p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_of5_dtj_x4b__ul_jxh_ftj_x4b">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Views</strong> is the total number of views for articles in the knowledge
base. You want to track this over time and see an increase in views. This can indicate
how well you’re doing promoting and driving the use of your help center and knowledge
base articles.
</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Net article votes</strong> is the difference of all the positive and negative votes
on all articles. If you’re getting a high number of negative votes on your articles,
that could indicate that they need to be updated and improved. On the other hand, a high
number of positive votes indicates that an article is useful and is helping to deflect
tickets.</li>
</ul>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_of5_dtj_x4b__ul_ow3_rtj_x4b">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Comments</strong> is the total number of comments on articles in the knowledge base. An
article with many comments can indicate that the content is confusing or incomplete and
requires your customers to ask follow-up questions. </li>
</ul>
<p class="p">For more information about this dashboard, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408830631962" target="_blank">Analyzing knowledge base activity</a>. </p>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title6" class="topic nested2" id="topic_wl4_ttj_x4b">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title6">Search activity</h3>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">Statistics on this dashboard include the total number of searches, searches with no
results, searches with no clicks, and tickets created. The last three are particularly
interesting because they indicate where you may have content gaps and that some articles
are not getting the job done.<ul class="ul" id="topic_wl4_ttj_x4b__ul_fhj_n1r_cpb">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">With no result</strong> is the number of searches that returned 0 results. What this
tells you is that your customers are searching for something that is not included in
your knowledge base. The search strings that are being used could be nonsense,
therefore no results, or you need a new knowledge base article to provide the
information they are looking for.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">With no clicks</strong> is the number of searches where no result was selected. This
might indicate a content gap (they searched for something, but nothing was available)
or that you need to update the titles of your knowledge base articles (the article is
there, but the title doesn’t contain the search term they’re using).</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Tickets created</strong> is the number of searches that led to a ticket being created.
Drilling down into the detail for this statistic, you can see each search term used
that resulted in a ticket being created. Two things could likely be happening here.
First, they searched for a term that had to result, so the customer immediately
created a ticket to get the answer they needed. Second, they clicked into an article
and for some reason needed more help from an agent, which might mean the article needs
to add more information.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p class="p">For each of these statistics, you can see the search strings that are being used. You
might find that customers are using alternate terms (an old product name, the term one of
your competitor’s uses for something you have a different name for) and common misspelled
words. This is where using labels comes in very handy. You can add these alternate terms
and misspellings as labels in your articles to improve the search results for your
customers.</p>
<p class="p">For more information about this dashboard, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408818465562" target="_blank">Analyzing help center search results</a></p>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title7" class="topic nested2" id="topic_xgk_smt_qwb">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title7">Knowledge activity</h3>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">If you’re using Knowledge in the Context panel to create articles and enable your agents
to link straight to your knowledge base content, reporting about its use is also
available. </p>
<p class="p">For more information about this dashboard, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408887529370" target="_blank">Analyzing your Knowledge activity</a>.</p>
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</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title8" class="topic nested2" id="topic_h3k_wtj_x4b">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title8">Community activity</h3>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Statistics on this dashboard include the number of posts created, how many users have
viewed posts, and the total number of votes, subscriptions, and comments.</p>
<p class="p">Because your community is there to also provide you with feedback, a community post could
be telling you that you need to create a knowledge base article to address the
subject.</p>
<p class="p">For more information about this dashboard, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4604030850842" target="_blank">Analyzing community activity</a>.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title9" class="topic nested2" id="topic_y4w_yvv_p3c">
<h3 class="title topictitle3" id="ariaid-title9">User session and page efficiency analysis</h3>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Zendesk contains built-in tools that help you understand how often your help center
articles and community posts are being viewed and who is viewing them. The prebuilt
dashboard can help you:</p>
<ul class="ul" id="topic_y4w_yvv_p3c__ul_gfv_s5v_p3c">
<li class="li">See user session outcomes for specific users.</li>
<li class="li">Look at trends across the different roles.</li>
<li class="li">Understand content performance, including which articles are most helpful and which
are responsible for the most tickets submitted.</li>
</ul>
<p class="p">See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/9118856019098" target="_blank">Analyzing user session and page efficiency activity in
the help center</a>.</p>
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