Reset the "Did you find this helpful?" rating for revised articles

67 Comments

  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    That is a great point, Meghan. Let's see if some other folks feel the need for this, too!

    0
  • Zac Garcia

    I also feel the need for this 😉

    However, I feel that it should be manual. For example, I may simply update an article to edit punctuation - in those cases, I don't want to reset the helpfulness rating.

    The manual ability to reset the rating may, in turn, impact the integrity of the entire rating system. And if users can't trust the ratings, then the appeal of users interacting with the content is eliminated. As a result, it seems best to let it stand as is, or perhaps to have ratings expire after a given period of time (such as a year). If an article is rated very poorly as unhelpful, maybe it's best to archive it and publish a completely overhauled article in its place, and give users an opportunity to speak their mind about it again with a clean slate. This seems similar in function to just "resetting the score", but it preserves the integrity of the rating system by forcing the publisher to go through a few steps to publish brand new content and put it in front of the user.

    There's no perfect solution when it comes to any user-generated content, from articles and comments, all the way down to small details like ratings. I think there are some solutions that work around the limitations we encounter in modifying users' input, and I think that protecting the input of those users is important if we would continue to solicit their feedback.

    4
  • Tim Shaw

    I agree, would be very useful.

    2
  • MyDeal Admin

    I agree this would be very useful for us as well. However it should be manual because the degree of changes would impact whether it should be reset or not. For example, a minor typo edit or rephrasing shouldn't automatically reset the ratings.

    We feel the main point of ratings is so that the author can gain feedback and make adjustments for the benefit of readers. Once adjustments have been made there should be an option to wipe the slate clean so that new feedback can be gathered on the latest version. Otherwise old ratings would negatively rub off on the updates.

    To make it more transparent a note could be added to the article when it has been updated and the ratings reset.

    3
  • Justin Fain

    I agree.  We would like to use this as well.

    2
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Justin, can you tell us more about your use case? 

    0
  • Justin Fain

    Hi Nicole.

    We make revisions and edits to our articles based on the ratings our users provide.  As others have suggested, it would be nice to manually reset the rating score when we've made major changes to a specific article so I can see if the new version is more effective at handling the intended issue.  For example, if an article has an overall rating of -10 (or less) and we overhaul the content, I'd like to reset the score to 0 so I can see if the revised version receives a better response.

    I also agree that I wouldn't want the score to automatically reset any time an article is revised.  We make minor changes to page content (grammatical issues, minor text tweaks, etc...) and I don't need to see the impact of these changes on ratings.

    7
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks, Justin. 

    0
  • Matt Dwyer

    Hi, I recently raised this to Zendesk Support. This would also be something my company would be interested in for our help centre. 

    2
  • Tim Shaw

    Please could Zendesk comment and say whether this is something which could/will be implemented?

    2
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hi Tim - 

    We're continuing to collect feedback from users. It may be something we implement in the future, but it has not been decided yet. 

    1
  • David da Silva Rosa

    Hello, I would like to have this functionality too. Right now it's hard to gauge if an article has been significantly improved. 

    3
  • Rob Reeve

    Wouldn't creating a whole new article solve this issue? If you're doing significant rewrites and also want to start over with a zero rating, why edit the old one? Deactivate it and start from scratch.

    -4
  • Mads

    I'm also interested in this feature. If an article has poor ratings, I'll update it, but the poor rating remains. This could bias users against reading that article, and may make them mistrust the information in it.

    As for my own tracking for helpfulness data, in Zendesk Insights, it would be useful to be able to see the graph for specific articles instead of the overall Guide helpfulness graph.

    To Rob's point, creating a new article to reset the ratings isn't a good solution because then all links to the old article will break (if a redirects feature existed, that would help).

    6
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks for your comment, Madeleine.

    1
  • Filiph Petzäll

    We'd also would very much like this feature.

    As mentioned before me, we'd use votes to see where we can improve the information (as would be the expected way to use it). Lets say we totally revamp an article with negative votes, the previous voters did not express what they thought about the new page. Which means that those votes would be for one; totally irrelevant for us and customers but mostly it would be very misleading for us when trying to improve our knowledge base!

    Im sorry to say but we cannot understand why this is not a feature as of today.

    2
  • Jacky Feng

    Yes we would like this feature as well as we are currently revamping our help centre articles. The most relevant article was downvoted in the past and despite our update to make it better, it won't show up at the top due to these past downvotes. Thanks!

    2
  • Dylan Miller

    We'd like to see this feature as well. We've revamped entire articles, and the historical votes don't really apply to the new content. We've gotten around it by creating new articles, but we prefer to update an existing article to avoid breaking hyperlinks. 

    4
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks for the additional comments, Jacky and Dylan! 

     

    1
  • Sorcha Millican-Nagle

    I agree that it would be useful to reset this, especially if you would like to use relatively the same URL for an article but it has had a significant revamp. 

    1
  • Maria Reyes

    I second Dylan's point. 

     

    Sometimes articles will be linked in other KBA's and it can be missed. 

     

    Resetting the counter can help with this issue! 

    Thank you. 

    1
  • Kathleen Hunt

    A manual reset of the counter OR a way to have the old article links automatically re-direct to the new, clean article is a must. How else can we see if the changes we've made to the article are actually improving customer satisfaction?

    3
  • Thomas Pettmann (Thomas)

    Hello,

    Any news on this? We're updating old articles and wish to gauge their effectiveness/relevance.

    2
  • Pedro Rodrigues

    +1

    2
  • Nicole Saunders
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hi Thomas - 

    No updates at this time. 

    0
  • Jamie

    I think this would be a good feature to have. I realise you could archive an old article and make a new article but it would be good for making tweaks to existing articles and seeing how they perform. Its just a matter of saving time rather than creating new articles each time, you can just copy and paste everything over and then make tweaks but it just like a lot of effort rather than hitting a re-set button.

    0
  • Dennis Beltran

    +1 here! It would be great to be able to reset once an article is edited.

    We have also just found that article vote percentage heavily affects our search results in our Help Center. Labels don't seem to influence it at all and we are not understanding why only articles votes affect the order.

    Anyone else having this issue?

    0
  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Dennis,

    If labels are not being factored into your search results there may be an underlying issue here. I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf and pass this over to our Customer Advocacy team to troubleshoot. You'll receive a follow-up email shortly stating your ticket has been created. I would recommend replying to that email with a couple of example labels as well as the relevant articles that should show up when you complete the search.

    Thanks in advance!

    1
  • Rob Stevens

    Chiming in with another request for this. We follow a KCS methodology, and iterating on content is an important part of that process. As we start deep linking to content in our platform, in emails, etc, it's important to keep the links intact, but when we make major revisions, we want to reset the vote counter to make sure we're getting a gauge on if the content is better at answering questions or not.

    0
  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Thanks for sharing Rob!

    While this isn't possible natively you can use the API to delete votes as mentioned in our API documentation.

    Most likely you'll need to create a script to pull all the votes from an article and then use the ID's you've retrieved to delete those votes.

    I realize there's a need for this functionality natively but did want to follow-up and provide the API as a workaround in the meantime.

    Thanks again!

    -1

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