I work for a B2B SaaS company in Brazil called RD Station, and we’re currently considering to create an online community.
We’re doing some benchmarks here, and it looks like that companies like ours have some really good ticket deflection metrics.
This metric is the sum of both direct ticket deflection(Absolute number of topics answered by the community, that because of this, didn’t create a ticket on our support channel) plus the indirect ticket deflection, that assumes that some of the “lurkers” of the community are having their questions answered just by reading the topic, but without interacting with the post.
Does anyone here measure the lurkers that are having the questions answered? I assume that is a pretty easy calculation:
You just have to create an exit-intent pop-up, that asks if that person had the questions successfully answered. And then, discover the percentage.
I’m assuming that it’s something between 1~2%, but maybe it’s a lot more(or a lot less).
I am not a lurker. But when I read a post in a topic I haven’t posted in that “answers a question”, I Like it. I can’t vouch for how valuable a metric it would be, but it should be easy enough to use the Data Explorer plugin to find the number of members that haven’t made any posts but have Liked.
Personally, I find exit pop ups annoying. I have no problem with “was this helpful? yes/no” inputs and sometimes I actually use them.
Hello, Mittineague, thanks for the answer.
I agree with you, pop-ups are in some way annoying.
I was lurking on you Sitepoint online community(very interesting, by the way.)
Do you have some estimative of how much of your lurkers have their questions answered? Because I’m afraid that the people that like or dislike the topics are so few that they don’t have statistical relevance
In our case, this metric is very important, and we’re totally blind on this issue.
Have you looked at net promoter score surveys? We use them in our community with some success, via a periodic popup when people log into the network. There are other ways to do them, by email for example, that might work better for other communities.
It really makes sense. Because if a user visits the community frequently, and rated us with a high NPS, we can infer that the posts are answering his/her questions.
Although, it still doesn’t give me that an absolute metric of e-mail deflection, that would be very valuable to prove the ROI of the online community.
P.S.: I was looking on some of the things that Namati does, and congratulations! Very important work =)
Just use the read times that Discourse already measures. See /users for example. Reading = participating. Discourse measures every millisecond a post is on screen for every logged in user.
it. I can’t vouch for how valuable a metric it would be, but it should be easy enough to use the Data Explorer plugin to find the number of members that haven’t made any posts but have Liked.