Identify Baseline Metrics
Baseline Numbers
It can be easy to forget project fundamentals and jump straight into knowledge management transformation around content, structure, access, and everything else involved in maturing your knowledge strategy. However, fundamentals are essential to illustrate the value of your hard work. Take the time to gather baseline numbers to help understand where you stand today.
After you define business outcomes and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your knowledge deployment, capture baselines of those KPIs before you implement a new knowledge strategy. This baseline is critical for quantifying a change in performance, for better or for worse.
Need help for how to capture baseline KPIs? Below are examples to help get you started.
Increase self-service and decrease customer effort
- How many self-service sessions occur per month?
- What are the most common click-paths to case submissions?
- How many Level 1 cases do you get per month that could be solved via self-service?
- What is your customer effort score?
Reduce support tickets
- How many tickets does the support department receive a month?
- Of the tickets received, what is the volume of tickets per submission type?
- Phone, email, web-to-case, etc.
- For each submission type defined above, what is the average cost per ticket?
- What are the most commonly received tickets by issue?
- If you have field service technicians (FST), how many service calls does the department receive per month?
- What is the average cost per service call?
- Are there metrics around repeat service calls? (FST has to visit same customer multiple times because they did not have the correct part, for example)
Shorten time to launch your product
- How long does it currently take to launch a new customer?
- How long does it take to train a customer in the product?
- Have accelerated training or launch times been correlated to higher retention or higher average spend?
- If so, what is the correlation?
Improve agent efficiency
- What are the average handle times for tickets, per submission type?
- Phone, email, web-to-case, etc.
- What is the first contact resolution (FCR) rate?
- How many tickets are escalated to a higher support tier for resolution?
- Are repeat tickets tracked (cases with the same issue opened by the same customer in X days)?
- If so, what is the volume or percent of repeat tickets?
- What are the support department's Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES)?
- How long does it take for new agents to be fully trained?
- What is the cost associated with training?
Improve user experience
- What is your site performance on desktop?
- What is your site performance on mobile?
- Does your site pass accessibility tests?
Action Item: Obtain your baseline metrics now to show value during business reviews with your executive team 6-12 months after launch.