What is success rate, and why does it matter?

In business, success rate measures the rate at which people who come to an online community — either as members or visitors — achieve their purpose for coming. While this measurement isn’t granular or detailed the way that many other KPIs are - it is a powerful indicator of whether your community is doing its primary job of providing a good customer experience. When combined with other information about what people were looking for, their names and roles, and their interests — the success rate can answer the most important question every key leader in your company has about your branded community: "Is it worth it?"

Brands don’t build loyalty and relationships overnight. These coveted achievements are the sum of many small interactions and experiences that satisfy customers — from finding the right information on the website to connecting with other experts to getting quality support when they need it. Success rate is an important metric that gives brands insight into the customer experience and whether they need to improve upon it or not.

When customers succeed in finding what they want, they have better experiences. Better experiences typically lead to happiness, and happiness leads to retention and growth. Of course, many other factors can influence happiness and customer relationships, so it would be a mistake to take success rate as the only metric that matters.

But your community is not where people go simply to hang out — it’s a place where they go to get stuff done. If they’re generally succeeding, then your community is probably doing its job, reducing churn, inspiring loyalty, and spreading knowledge along the way.

Importantly, it’s not just customer relationships that can benefit from improved success rate; it’s also any other functions that Khoros Communities serve. For example, SAS uses success rate to measure call deflection. Chris Hemedinger, Head of Online Communities at SAS, says:

“In the past 12 months we received over 10,000 completed surveys. Of the visitors who say they were looking for info (nearly 90%), 74% say they found what they needed. And of those, 21% say they would have opened a support case as a next step. Using the Value Analytics formula, we could calculate that 14% of our visits (1 in 7) represent a deflected support case. Multiply by millions of visits...and the cost of a support case...well, it's a big number for savings.”

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Now that we’ve covered why success rate is so important, let’s go over the steps you can take to start measuring it in your online brand community.

Set up surveys

If you’re a Khoros Communities customer, your platform includes the Value Analytics feature. You can use the default questions or change them to fit your particular needs. Any survey you produce with this feature, even if you customize it, will also match your branding in the community.

Setting up randomized surveys can help you gather qualitative data from community members (or even visitors). Start by asking a few simple, multiple-choice questions:

• Did you find what you were looking for today?

  • Yes

  • No

• What were you looking for?

  • Support

  • Experts

  • Product feedback

  • Other (please specify)

• If you didn’t find what you were looking for, what would be your next step?

  • Open a support request via [insert channel]

  • Go to a different site

  • Other (please specify)

What’s most important here, however, is the first question, which determines the success rate.

Asking about what the community user was looking for can be customized based on your priorities and what you want from your community. Asking what the next step for users who report not finding what they’re looking for helps define the Call Deflection Rate — a key indicator of how a community impacts support costs. Many communities focus on support, but more and more are branching out to include co-innovation with customers, loyalty and advocacy programs, and much more. We highly recommend using communities for more than just support, as they can have a far greater impact.

Many community managers also use third-party tools, such as Qualtrics, to customize further and pool the data into one common "voice of customer" database for their entire brand. Of course, the data all belongs to you, so you can use it in any way that you think will help.

Define success

Successful customer interactions can be defined in many different ways, and of course, success depends on what the customer wants. Indeed, success isn’t always good; if someone comes to your community to confirm that they prefer your competitor, success is decidedly bad. That’s why it’s always important to pay attention to the customer’s goal, and, when appropriate, to support them in reaching it.

If they are researching a vendor, they could define success as just uncovering a bunch of happy (or not) customers. If they want to resolve an issue with a product, then resolution equals success. If they just want to share ideas or connect with peers, that is a bit harder to define. In the example from Fitbit’s community below, there are a mix of reasons why people visit the community. Some people ask about how to use their device, others are reporting issues, and one is even sharing their experience with the product and customer service.

The key takeaway is that success differ for every user, as each person visits a community with a specific goal. Some success metrics are easier to measure than others, but all the information is valuable.

Take action

Even the most detailed, granular metric isn’t helpful if it doesn’t provide actionable insight. Depending on customer feedback, you may need to focus on a few key customers or visit segments to take your community to the next level. Maybe your community doesn’t offer something a user was looking for, it might make sense to add that feature or additional support.

Either way, it doesn’t do a brand any good if they don’t implement the customer feedback they’ve received.

To calculate the success rate of a branded community, you’ll first need to collect data. Define the specific tasks to be evaluated, gather the data, and then categorize it into unsuccessful or successful. From there, the general success rate formula is simple: divide the number of successfully completed tasks by the total number of attempted tasks, then multiply by 100.

You can select specific users and then conduct user testing sessions to observe and record user interactions and behaviors to collect your data. This is also referred to as the Task Success Rate (TSR). Ideally, tasks will be easy to complete in your community, which increases satisfaction and the likelihood of conversion.

Let’s say a company wants to track the success rate of customer support inquiries, so they send a single-question survey to 1,000 people asking “Was your question or inquiry resolved?” immediately after interacting with support. If 750 people responded “Yes” and 250 people answered “No”, then the success rate would be 75% because 750 of the 1,000 people succeeded in resolving their inquiry.

The value of online communities is tough to measure, but Khoros Communities has a simple, unique solution built into every brand community: Success Rate. Our solution helps you create reports to analyze trends and gain insights into the success rate of your branded community. We can also create benchmarks for company size, industry, and other custom criteria.

To learn more about how you can measure the value of your community, check out our Success Rate Guide or request a demo today.