Question

Self-service score benchmark for B2B Saas communities

  • 21 December 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 39 views
emily.arent

Hi there community builders!


As we approach the end of 2022 and the 7 month anniversary of our community launch, I’m diving deep on our self-service metrics in collaboration with our Customer Support leadership. 


I understand that what success looks like is going to differ significantly from community to community. But I’m hoping to zero in on some sort of benchmark we can aim towards for our self-service score in 2023. Is anyone else who’s running a B2B Saas community willing to share theirs as well as how long you’ve been live and any projects / programs you feel have been instrumental to making progress on this metric?

 

For reference - we started at 0.1 back in July and were at 0.16 in November. 

// Em

2 replies

Alistair FIeld
Rank
Userlevel 6
Badge +2

Hi @emily.arent 

I would love to talk 1-2-1 with you about self service success. I have personally worked for the last 10 years in support/success with self service a priority and am also looking to level up what I do here with inSpired.

Would you be open to having a call in a couple of weeks (i am out of office next week)

ddpancratz
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +3

We migrated a Q&A-based community with 2+ years of questions and answers when we launched in August of 2021, so it’s very different from starting from scratch. 

  • 6.0 in our first full month: September 2021
  • 8.24 in our first three months: September - November 2021
  • 11.0 last month: January 2023
  • 11.53 over the last three months: November 2022 - January 2023

Q&A is the core of our community; we host documentation elsewhere, not in our knowledge base. On an average month, we add 150-200 new questions and our answer rate has increased from around 45% on our previous platform to 75% over the last three months. That gives a large base of “help content” to drive up that ratio. Over that time, we’ve been able to scale Q&A success through our community members, primarily external contributors from our Partners and Customers, and increase the % of answers provided by external users from ~30% to >80% each month/quarter. 

A tremendous driver of our success is a super user program we call our community Subject Matter Experts. I recently revamped it to be the details found here, but before that it required earning 200+ for three consecutive months and answering 20 questions. The SME badge (on our community and issued via Credly for Linkedin, etc) is quite valuable to our user base and the primary motivator in getting external users to answer questions. It’s helped users get promotions and hired elsewhere as a rubber stamp of their expertise.

 

 

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings