Question

Self-service score benchmark for B2B Saas communities

  • 21 December 2022
  • 7 replies
  • 164 views

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. 


7 replies

Userlevel 3
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)

Userlevel 5
Badge +4

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.

 

 

@DannyPancratz how did you issued the badge for Linkedin? I mean, is it an integration? Which one?

Userlevel 5
Badge +4

@Lais Laudari We use Credly as a third party solution for our certifications and I created a community SME badge there as well.

I manually issue the badges for our SME program twice:

  1. Their community profile
  2. Credly

I imagine it could be automated via Zapier* to issue to both, but I’m issuing 0-2 per month, so it’s not too cumbersome. 

*I have similar automations where I add an email to a google sheet and it triggers an automation to award a badge and/or award points. 

Thank you @DannyPancratz!

Im looking for a way to integrate directly with LinkedIn. Once a member is awarded a specific badge, they will have an option of post it on Linkedin and tell all their network. 

Userlevel 5
Badge +4

@Lais Laudari at the moment, you’d need to double issue the badge with another solution like Credly. 

It’d be great if Insided / Gainsight DH added this ability natively as well; social sharing is a really powerful tool for awareness, amplification, and further gamificaiton. 

Here’s an idea to vote for: 

I have some ideas related to this on the community, not linkedin:

 

Totally agreed @DannyPancratz!

I hope to have it here in a near future🙏🏼

Thanks a lot for your help!

Reply