Self-service to the rescue! But how effective is your solution base?

According to a study by Forrester , 72% of US customers prefer to use a company's website to get answers to their questions rather than contact the concerned service desk via telephone or email. If that number feels a little big, ask yourself: When was the last time you picked up the phone and called your service desk to raise a request or report a problem? Well, unless the issue is a show-stopper, we all prefer the good old knowledge base articles.

With more and more customers turning to self service, it's up to the help desk manager to ensure that the knowledge base is fully stocked with relevant articles and solutions. But, it doesn't end there. How do you know if your knowledge base (KB) articles are useful? How can you tell if your solutions are really making an impact? Well, the answer is to pull up a solution effectiveness report like the one below.

This report compares the number of requests raised against the number of requests resolved using knowledge base articles. Higher the number of requests resolved by KB articles, the more useful and effective the solutions are. This report is also useful to check if the usage of KB articles brings down the number of requests created each month.

To ensure self-service initiatives are successful, help desk need to periodically review their solutions for usefulness, and take steps to review and update the articles to keep up with the current set of help desk problems.

The above report is one of the 400+ reports offered out-of-the-box for ServiceDesk Plus integrations with Analytics Plus. To check out more such reports and dashboards, check out our online demo.