Ratings or Helpful/ Not Helpful? > How are these working for you?

[Jayne Loh]

Happy new year everyone!

This is a topic that we come back to very frequently - if we should use either one of the feature to rate an article with a 5 star rating scale or Helpful/Not Helpful scale.

I was combing through these forums and found that many kept both which we originally did but we didn't get good data points from both and found it confusing to explain difference between top rated vs helpful/not helpful.

Our current setup: Helpful/Not Helpful - not helpful triggers KFT creation. Note we had comments turned off as well since we had issues moderating comments shown publicly on a HR Knowledge Base. 

Most common setup seen here: Having both, Not Helpful + Rating 3 stars or less triggers KFT.

Would love to hear from your experiences and best practice.

1. If you use both, why and how to you measure these metrics for reporting
2. If you use either one, why and is it working well for you

Thanks in advance and hope to learn from your experiences!

[andreababch]

Great topic. We just implemented this last month to add the feedback form and where it creates a task if marked as No or if Rated 2 stars or lower. We did this to make sure that action is happening by the author after to improve our user articles and not just falls into a black hole in a report. A lot of KB owners had the same question of using Helpful vs Ratings. I like to keep both and think of Yes or No as did it help solve your issue and Ratings as the quality of the article, which is something different. For this reason, we kept both on our IT portal, but up to KB owners ultimately. We do not use it on our Internal IT KB, and for this just ask the agents to flag for issues. Would love to hear more on everyone's experience as well.

[Jayne Loh]

curious to understand if you do have any dashboards that show a cumulative score of how "good" an article is looking at both helpful + stars rating?

[Arnaldo]

Hello everyone and happy new year also form my side.

I think that to keep both enabled, it would be helpful to explain to users when to use one solution and when to use the other.

We have kept both solutions enabled for a few years without providing specific instructions on their use, and finally the result is that 80% of users prefer to use Useful/Not Useful. Even in the remaining 20%, users polarized their rating to 1 or 5 stars in fact expressing an evaluation of the useful/not useful type.

If we look at how some large companies (ServiceNow SAP IBM ) have handled this issue to handle documentation feedback we see that helpful Not helpful is the most adopted solution.

5-star rating is mostly used when evaluating a product or service but not a documentation.

Even for those who manage documentation Helpful /not helpful feedback provides clear message whether or not the document needs to be updated

[Jayne Loh]

I noticed that you used "useful/not useful".  One common feedback we get is the stigma in clicking on "not helpful", users find it pretty harsh when there is only one portion of the article that requires some updates. I wonder if you did implement anything to change the wording so it is more friendly and invites more actionable feedback.