Apportioning Knowledge Article deflection success by category

[Chris Armstron1]

Hi All,

We're using the Knowledge article deflection metric.

Formula: customer has viewed a knowledge article and not raised an incident within the next 24hrs = 1 deflection

We can see that there appears to be quite a lot of successful self-service taking place. It's recently sharply increased because we've added AI search to our Virtual Agent so that it provides knowledge articles in the conversation, leading to more customers seeing the articles.

However, we would expect to see a reduction in calls to the IT Helpdesk as a byproduct of increased self-service success - But we cannot see an overall reducing in call volumes. Our management is keen to see this as a tangible benefit of self-service - reducing calls. We would like to be able to view knowledge article deflection on a more granular level to see if there are smaller correlations between increases in deflection for individual topics, such as iPhone, printing etc. 

Is anyone aware of a way to find this information without additional customisation or configuration of the product?

Kindest regards,

Chris

[Chris Armstron1]

Our articles are separated into categories, is there a way we can view knowledge article deflection by knowledge base category?

[BhupeshG]

 @Pranav Bhagat - Can you please help redirect this to right people who are SMEs in this area

[David Kay]

Chris -  The vast majority of the people who attempt self-service were not going to open a case.  So you really can't call it a deflection when they don't.

Contact Rate--the number of incoming incidents or cases per...some proxy for demand...is a great thing to track.  In the case of IT Helpdesks, "some proxy for demand" is typically the number of employees you're supporting.  So if headcount is increasing, you could have increasing incident volumes at the same time the Contact Rate goes down...that's still a good thing to take credit for.

Of course, self-service effectiveness is only one factor that drives Contact Rate...changes in the complexity or quality of the IT infrastructure you're supporting can lead to big changes in Contact Rate.

Finally, please remind your management why your organization exists...you're there to make your fellow employees more productive.  So even if someone weren't ever going to open a case, if you help them with self-service, you're still accomplishing your core mission, deflection or no.

Here's more detail on calculating deflection: https://www.dbkay.com/files/DBKay-SimpleTechniquesforEstimatingCallDeflection.pdf

[Mike Van Vooren]

David, thank you for sharing this guidance!  You always seem to be one step ahead of us on these topics.  After reading your document on calculating this metric, I believe we have the data between SN and our 3rd party tools.

If we wanted to get more data with "proactive" surveys, have you seen success in electronic distribution vs phone calls?  I think your proposed questions are good, but I am thinking of other channels we can use versus just phone.