Avinash Kaushik (yes I think he’s pretty sharp!) mentions in his Web Analytics 2.0 book that for web metrics, you should focus on some “critical few” questions. If the bridge/platform is burning, what are the key things that can drive real action and offer the strongest results for the effort? This can be translated as well into an overall strategic plan. For me, it boils down to this, three questions that are customer focused, and a fourth that is internal to the business:

Customer-focused

Internal-focused

So what do you think?  What are your critical few questions?

I had the pleasure last Tuesday of attending Lithium Technologie’s official launch of their European operations in Zurich.  Yesterday they moved to London to repeat the show there.  In his presentation, CEO Lyle Fong provided some interesting background on the birth of Lithium, which came from the experiences he and his brother Dennis had in their younger days as some of the first professional online gamers.  Central to the “culture” of Lithium’s forum technology is the gamer’s concept of reputation, privileges and points, which fuels the communities’ engagement and desire to participate (play).  As Lyle pointed out to me, in an online game, there is the “warrior,” the big guy with all the muscles, body armour, fighting and blood and guts all around.  But he would be dead in minutes without the cleric behind him continually healing his wounds and the mage casting spells to weaken the enemies.  Lithium, as Lyle explained, also has a much deeper level of acknowledging different types of contributors in a forum, as it takes a synergistic mix of various personalities to sustain a healthy community forum. 

Behind the interface and the UI, Lithium collects and analyzes data to understand the science of what makes communities healthy and vibrant. They have developed what they call a Community Health Index (or CHI – I like that, sounds like the eastern concept of “chi” or life energy). 

How about you, do you have communities at your company, and how are you using them? Do you report on their bottom line value to the business?

Disclaimer: in my current position at Autodesk we are working with Lithium Technologies.

I am working my way through Avinash Kaushik’s excellent latest book, Web Analytics 2.0 – the Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity. I have been looking for a crash course in web metrics to quickly render me an analysis ninja, and this is definitely fitting the bill so far. He writes in a very personable style, easy to understand – highly recommended. Avinash also donates 100% of the proceeds to two charities, so deepen your knowledge while helping those in need!

One thing he highlights in Chapter 3 as he talks about different web metrics is Bounce Rate, which is when a visitor comes to a single page on your site and then leaves with no further interaction. He describes this as almost always bad, as the user is not interacting with the site. The one exception he cites is for blog posts, where it is expected that the regular blog reader will just go to the post, leave and then exit. He further mentions a way to review site exits is to contrast Bounce Rate (mostly bad) with Exit Rate, which is how many people left the site from a particular page (not bad or good, hard to measure why). If a Bounce Rate is low but the Exit Rate is higher, then in general users are just leaving from this page, but it is not strongly negative.

For those of us in Technical Support, however, both Bounce and Exit Rates are valuable metrics; if we have a Knowledge Base which is well-indexed by search engines, and the article is well-written to solve a particular issue (and has no other links), we would expect a successful article to have a high Bounce Rate. This means the customer who was searching for an answer found our article through web search, and it answered their issue. A high Exit Rate would show that the user was searching on our site for an answer and once again, found the article and left, problem solved.

Of course there is always the chance they became frustrated and just chose to leave, but in most cases I believe we can assume they would refine their search, looking for a satisfactory answer before giving up and leaving. This also highlights the need for KB articles to have a tool for customer rating and/or feedback.

Support Unfolding. My first thought was to name the blog “Support Evolution” but I quickly realized that name would be too controversial and I would probably get more curious viewers expecting writings on Charles Darwin! This blog is about the unfolding of Web technologies and specifically how this impacts those working in the field of Technical Support. Right now we are in the midst of Web 2.0, which according to Wikipedia “… is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web.” These new technologies are rapidly redefining how the world does business, both B2B (Business to Business) and B2C (Business to Customer) – Technical Support is a part of that and we also must consider how we can evolve to take advantage of these changes, both to serve our customers better and to help our companies do so in a cost-effective way. For me personally, as Social Media Manager in Product Support at Autodesk, this means many things, for example:

How to best implement new forums to leverage the power of communities to resolve first level technical support issues

How to use blogs, Twitter and other well-known social media tools to interact with customers in new and different ways

How to best use web analytics to measure performance and success of initiatives

How to communicate and gain support within the company for trying new ways of doing our Technical Support business

And of course this is just the tip of the iceberg – so come and join me on this journey to chart new waters in the realm of Technical Support and stay on top of what is happening and how our industry can benefit from it. I welcome and encourage your participation!