Why and How Should You Track Your Knowledge Base Metrics?

A few days ago, I was talking with a friend, let’s call him Ben, who started hitting the gym about a week back. Curious about Ben’s newfound goal, I asked him about his workout routine and how he was tracking his progress. While the workout routine was fine, I was surprised to hear he was not tracking any progress. To quote Ben exactly, “I don’t need to track it, I’ll see the difference in the mirror”. This is Ben, do not be like Ben.

Maintaining a knowledge base is like going to the gym, not because you’ll grow muscles, instead you grow your customer retention rates. If Ben were maintaining a knowledge base the same way he maintains his workouts, he’d be making a big mistake.

Just as how the mirror technique might be unreliable, running a knowledge base without tracking any key performance indicators can lead to missed opportunities and issues. Moreover, without KPIs, Ben wouldn’t know if his knowledge base is even working as intended.

Setting KPIs should be a no-brainer and must be the first thing someone does after setting up a knowledge base, or workout routine for that matter. We wouldn’t want to drive to a new place without a map right?

Setting and Tracking KPIs for your Knowledge Base

Setting KPIs starts by figuring out your goals with the knowledge base. Ask yourself, what’s the main purpose of the knowledge base?

• Is it to reduce support tickets?
• Is it to provide self-service to your customers?
• Is it to onboard customers/employees more efficiently?
• Is it to drive product adoption?

These are some examples, but once your goals are set, you’ll have a clear destination for the drive. The knowledge base map can now give us the best route in the form of KPIs, let’s see how:

1. Support Tickets Reduction

This KPI looks at how effective the knowledge base is at deflecting or preventing support tickets from being created.

Metrics to track:
Support Ticket Rate - Check if the amount of support tickets you receive reduces over a period of time.

Knowledge Base Visits - Track if the number of visits to your knowledge base has increased in the same period your support tickets have reduced.

How it helps: We can say the knowledge base content is effective at reducing support tickets If the support ticket rate reduces and the knowledge base visits have increased during the same period.

2. Support Ticket Resolution

A good knowledge base should be able to assist your customer support team like never before. Support ticket resolution looks at how the knowledge base helps with resolving tickets more efficiently.

Metrics to track:
Support Ticket Deflection - This lets you know the number of issues that were closed by redirecting them to the knowledge base vs the number of issues that were escalated to a support executive.

Knowledge Base Articles Usage - The number of knowledge base articles that are being used to resolve customer queries.

How it helps: The higher the numbers are in these metrics, the more efficient they are at assisting the customer support team in resolving tickets and issues, reducing the burden on them.

Here’s what Dennis Wakabayashi, one of the top CX experts, had to say about ticket deflection measures..

3. Self-Service Success Rate

This KPI helps you understand the number of people who effectively use your knowledge base to get value out of it.

Metrics to track:
Knowledge Base Engagement - Track the number of people who view your knowledge base. You can also go in-depth to find the most & least viewed pages, pages where users spend the most time, etc.

Search Bar Metrics - Check if your search feature is fetching relevant content based on the query. Learn about the keywords people are using to search. Find out the most used search terms that do not pull up any content.

How it helps: Analyzing these metrics gives you a picture of how customers are using your knowledge base and if it is effective enough.

4. Product Adoption

Any external knowledge base’s main job is to provide information related to the product and its features to help out customers. If that’s successful, then product adoption will gradually increase.

Metrics to track:
Product Usage - Track how the product usage has improved since launching the knowledge base.

Customer Retention Rate - This is the number of customers who continue to use the product without churning. This number should ideally increase over time due to the effects of the knowledge base.

How it helps: An increase in product usage and customer retention rate indicates that the knowledge base is helping customers understand the product better and enabling them to use it more.

5. Customer Onboarding Efficiency

This helps you understand how efficient the knowledge base is at onboarding new customers and getting them started to use your product.

According to Wyzowl, 86% of people say they’d be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them after they’ve bought. So, we wouldn’t recommend skipping this KPI.

Metric to track:
Customer Onboarding Articles - Track the customer onboarding article engagement metrics such as views, time spent on the article, etc.

Customer Onboarding Completion Rate - Track how fast customers are getting onboarded since implementing the knowledge base

Customer Onboarding Support Rate - Check the number of onboarding-related support tickets before and after the launch of the knowledge base.

How it helps: If the customer onboarding articles are getting good engagement, and customers can complete the onboarding faster without having to request support, your customer onboarding has just been improved.

Assisting Metrics For All KPIs

1. Customer Feedback

Get first-hand feedback directly from your customers through the knowledge base. They’ll let you know what articles they do and do not find useful, provide suggestions on improvement, and help you discover the need for new articles.

2. Article Updation Rate

This metric is all about how frequently are you updating your knowledge base so that the contents are up-to-date for both the customers and the support team to use. Outdated information is the last thing we want in our knowledge base.

Both of these metrics combined will give you an idea of how well your knowledge base is running and how satisfied your users are. You’ll be able to see room for improvement and gaps to fix as you continue to take in feedback.

Most Knowledge Base Software has in-built analytics, you can also connect it with Google Analytics and customer support tools to track metrics that require integrations.

I hope this blog gives you a headstart in your Knowledge Base analytics journey. Set goals, and KPIs and track them with specific metrics to keep improving your knowledge base. But don’t stop there! Analyze if your knowledge base software is well-equipped to meet your goals. Our Guide on Knowledge Base Software [2024] will help you choose the right knowledge base software based on your needs.