KPIs for Social Media based Customer Service

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Permalink Reply by Steven Earle on January 5, 2010 at 6:07pm

Please add me as a friend and then I would very much look forward to discussing this with you

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Permalink Reply by Haim Toeg on February 28, 2010 at 9:48am

Setting up a social media support forum and trying to measure its effectiveness is an interesting challenge. Expecting it to reduce the volume of incoming cases is a long term proposition that has to be managed carefully before you have any chances of success at all.

Consider this, in order for the forum to become a successful support tool, you will have to create traffic, first of browsers and then of contributors. In the mean time it will be up to your staff to encourage the traffic, respond to questions and keep the forum alive. Therefore in the first period of its life, measuring volume of traffic, repeat visitors, time spent, number of responders from outside your organization is exactly the right thing to do. You want to make sure there is interest and value to the visitors, regardless of the reduction in case volume you experience.

Eventually, you'd want to think about measuring the impact the social media initiative has on your incoming workload - now the main effect you are hoping for is reduced number of cases. This can be manifested in one of two ways:
1. Fewer new cases
2. New cases are better documented and therefore more efficiently managed and resolved

The main challenge in directly measuring the impact your social media initiative (or knowledge base, or anything else designed to reduce case load) is that you can't measure the things that did not happen. In other words, there are multiple reasons a customer did not open a case, for example: no problem happened due to improved product quality based on support feedback, they are phasing your product out due to reduced quality and are not interested in investing time in resolving minor problems, your knowledge management initiative is highly effective and the customer found a solution there, and so on.

What you can do is deduce the effectiveness based on several other measurements you'll have to look at, for example:
1. How does your workload develop based based on your revenues, if you are growing revenues and reducing workload you are likely doing something right
2. Ask your customers when they open a new case whether or not they have tried to use the website / forum / whatever and failed to find a solution
3. Measure the number of visitors to the site that open a new case within 24 / 48 hours after their visit
4. Ask your customers how useful they think the tool is during customer survey
5. Measure the value to your organization through the content and information you were able to retrieve from the forum into your own systems and processes

There is an excellent book you may want to look at, it's called Collective Wisdom, written by Françoise Tourniaire and David Kay, they have section discussing metrics for Knowledge Management initiatives which applies equally well to an social initiative. Also, there have been several valuable discussions on John Ragsdale's blog, Esteban Kolsky's blog, and the eVergance blog.

Please let me know if you wish to discuss this any further and I'd be happy to help.

Haim

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Permalink Reply by John Ragsdale on March 23, 2010 at 8:03am

Judging from this year's batch of Star Award applications for Best Online Community, the focus seems to be on effectiveness. Why did people come to the forum (problem to solve or just curious?), did they get an answer, and will they come back? Unfortunately, it seems that surveys are the most effective way to gather this info, because most forum implementations don't allow accurate reporting for self-service success.

I also think the percent of community members who actively participate (as compared to lurkers) is telling.

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