Guide reporting tools for measuring self-service

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 as ticket 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.

Topics covered in this article:

• 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 () in the sidebar, then click the 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.

You can filter your knowledge base activity according to the following channels:

• Help center
• Mobile SDK
• Web Widget (Classic)

What you can learn

For the knowledge base, measuring user engagement is key. How are your customers participating and what are they contributing? To understand that, look at the following metrics.

• Views The 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 - Comments are added to articles 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.

Learn more

• Analyzing knowledge base activity with Explore

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 () in the sidebar, then click the 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.
• Tickets 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.

Learn more

• Analyzing help center search results with Explore

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 to set 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

After you set up Google Analytics and have some data to work with (gathered over several months, for example), begin looking at the key metrics including:

• Page views - This is the number of page views in your help center. 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

• Google Analytics and your help center - Part 1: Asking the right questions
• Google Analytics and your help center - Part 2: Measuring the effectiveness of search
• Google Analytics and your help center - Part 3: Tracking customers' actions
• Google Analytics and your help center - Part 4: Fine-tuning your help center
• Google Analytics 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 your self-service score is. 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

This 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.

Note: To calculate your self service score, you need a Google Analytics account plus the Professional or Enterprise versions of Zendesk Support with Zendesk Explore Professional enabled, (you can run limited reports using the prebuilt dashboards in Explore Lite, see Activating Zendesk Explore.

To calculate your self-service score

1. Set up Google Analytics account and connect it to Guide as described in Enabling Google Analytics for your help center.
2. 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.
3. 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 the D_COUNT(Requesters) metric with a Ticket created - date filter for the months you want to report on. For help, see Getting 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. In 6 steps for measuring self-service success, 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

Analyzing your Knowledge Capture activity

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

Analyzing your Knowledge Capture activity.

A summary of your self-service channel reporting options

Here’s a quick overview of the metrics we just described and what products and tools you need to report on them.

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
Google Analytics	All plans, with Google Analytics enabled	Google Analytics 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