Autoreplies metrics are available to help you understand how autoreplies with articles for email and web form are performing. Based on the metrics, you can update your help center content to improve your suggestion rate, click-through rate, and resolution rate, and decrease your rejection rate.
This article contains the following sections:
Improving your suggestion rate for autoreplies with articles
The suggest rate is the percentage of questions that autoreply capability was active for and has sent suggestions for. If the suggest rate is low, or lower than expected, it can indicate that article labels are misconfigured or that you receive a larger-than-usual number of questions from unsupported languages.
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Check your autoreply trigger notification body (email autoreplies only). Your autoreply triggers require the placeholders
{{answer_bot.article_list}}
or{{answer_bot.article_body}}
. If these placeholders are not present in the body of the email notification the trigger will still fire, but no articles will be suggested. This can cause the suggest rate to reflect inaccurately. Learn more about configuring autoreply triggers. - Check your article labels. If you're using labels, this might be the cause of a lower suggest rate. Labels restrict which articles are searched. If relevant articles aren't in the restricted set, then no articles are suggested. This can cause the suggest rate to decrease. Learn more about using labels with autoreplies.
Improving your click-through rate for autoreplies with articles
Click-through is the percentage of answers clicked by end users from the total articles suggested.
Th click-through metric highlights a disadvantage of emailed autoreplies with articles because users must first open and read the body of the email before they are likely to click through to any articles.
- Make the subject line more appealing and accurate. The email isn't just an acknowledgement email, it's got valuable content within it that may answer the user's question. Be clear about this in the subject line.
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Don't hide the content. It's important that you craft the body of your message with
purpose. Use conditional logic to craft a message to your users and
make sure the
{{answer_bot.article_list}}
or{{answer_bot.article_body}}
placeholders are positioned at the best place in the email body.
Improving your resolution rate for autoreplies with articles
- Retain as much question context as possible. If you can retain as much similar phrasing of the original question within the article, the contextual match will be better. For example, the question "I can't log in, so how can I reset my password?" should result in an article with the title "How do I reset my password so I can log in?"
- Keep the article focused on a single problem. Each article should focus on one problem and one solution only. If you have long FAQ articles, consider breaking the FAQs into separate articles and grouping them together in an FAQ section. Also, remember that there is greater emphasis on the first paragraph or two of the article (approximately the first 75 words in English), so be sure to include as much contextually-relevant information into the top of the article as possible.
Decreasing your rejection rate for autoreplies with articles
- Write articles with a clear title, concise introduction, and narrow focus. Article titles should be phrased as a question or a simple, active phrase. The intro should include keywords and context in the first 75 words, and the article should be focused on a single, specific topic.
- Use article labels to filter results. Labels can help reduce "noise" in your help center by focusing retrieval results on the articles you want to be considered. Labels can also help target customer segments by showing each segment only the relevant articles.
For more information, see Optimizing your help center content.
6 comments
Xin Bao
I noticed that 1/3 of our articles' title starting with "How do I..." and for some reason the Guide considers "how do I" as a keyword, and this caused lots of more relevant articles without "How do I" being lowered in the Help center search result rank. This directly affects our Answer bot suggestion quality in the classic widget.
Is there any plan to address this issue soon?
2
Charles Gresula
Hi Xin Bao
The Answer Bot looks at an article's title when determining whether an article is a good candidate for a customer's problem and if an article's title closely matches the text of a support request, it's more likely to come up as an Answer Bot suggestion.
Since formatting your title as a question (How do i. . .) doesn't seem to work, how about using a simple, active phrase?
Example:
"How do I reset my password?" vs "Resetting a password"
1
Rich Andersen
Hi @..., Your comment (which makes sense to me) seems to contradict the article. If all of my articles start with 'How do I...?' then wouldn't the 'How do I...' become unnecessary? Also, I noticed very early on that having all articles start with 'How do I...' is not very scannable for users trying to find articles by either the keyword search bar or simply browsing.
7
Matthew McGarity
FYI, there's a typo in this article:
t's is missing the letter i.
0
Jennifer Rowe
Thanks for letting us know, Matthew McGarity. We've fixed the typo!
0
Nikki Goodson
This has been a topic of interest of mine for a long time: how to title articles? When I revamped our help center a couple years ago, I did a lot of research and determined that they should all be formatted as questions. Ideally, the exact question a person is coming to answer. But as Rich pointed out, it may become difficult for a human to scan a bunch of “How do I…?" articles. And if Xin is right that this is impacting the Answer Bot's performance, even more of a concern.
And, when I researched it earlier this week, some sources indicate that they absolutely should NOT be questions! I'm so confused!
1