Improving Accepted Solution rate

[i_am_ryan]

Hello all!

In our community when someone asks their question and it gets a response, an auto-generated email is sent off with a CTA of accepting the solution or replying to the thread to keep the conversation going. This is sent out 48 hours after their post gets a reply.

Using Care, after a post gets a reply, I snooze it for 2 days to track to see if the user came back to take any action.

If the user doesn't take any of those two actions, I send them a PM with a slightly different copy but with the same core message of Accept the Solution or jump back into the conversation to keep it going. Then I snooze the post for another 2 days.  

So now after 4 business days, if the OP does not take any action, I close it out in Care with a resolution of "user did not respond"

I'm looking to improve the accepted solution metric by encouraging members to followup with their questions and close the loop. 

Are any of you tracking this metric in a similar way (auto-generated email vs PM or this metric at all?) If so, how are you doing it?

Any thoughts/techniques to improve the closure outcome?

I can share the copy we use in both the auto-generated email and PM if that helps. 

Best,

Ryan

[Wendy_S]

It would be good to share the verbiage. 😊 And perhaps see if you get some suggestions here. You can play around with some A/B testing perhaps.

Just talking from experience and my own user behavior.

This is a difficult one. Customers often don't even come back to read the message and when they actually do, they usually don't take the time to mark a solution as excepted. It's often also discouraging to our volunteers are they spend their time to write an answer.

So, we haven't found the magic solution but what I will say.

Wording and call to action might make a difference. Adding a reason why a user should mark an accepted solution could be helpful. The "What's in It for me" might not be obvious to the users so perhaps calling out that it helps others find a solution to their question by sharing this solution could spark the altruism in them. Try to add a personal note, if you and your moderators are doing this manually. 

I am not sure the type of community you are running but instead of a private note you could try to post a public reply in a thread and this may educate other members of the community as well and start the domino effect of accepting answers as solutions.

Try to make it as easy as possible to accept a solution, perhaps by allowing to accept a solution via email without the need to login (need to look at technical feasibility)

Try to get to the source of why people are not accepting solutions. Maybe the users don't read the answers (difficult to measure I know) or maybe it simply wasn't the answer to their questions. Offer a next step of help to get them back into the conversation.

It is a hard nut to crack. We can also debate how much an AS rate reflects the actual success of the community. Often it is used as a KPI to measure community succes but knowing so many users are simply not taking a moment to mark the solution even if it solved the issue makes this metric less reliable and reflective of your customer experience. I would not stare blind on it myself.

Just my 2 cents. I am also curious to see if others have any ideas.

Good topic!
Wendy

[i_am_ryan]

Hi Wendy,

Thanks for your input. 

Our community is a technical one for users who purchased our product or who are trialing it out. 

This is our copy for the automated email that gets sent out (after 2 day after a reply is made to their post)

"We encourage you to review and if you find it useful please give kudos to the poster.

If the post answers your questions sufficiently, please consider marking it as an Accept as Solution. Accepted solutions help the community at large find answers faster.

Thanks for contributing,
The AppDynamics Community Team

Tip: Make sure to click on the link to reply directly in community. Replying to this email won't post a reply to the community thread."

Then after two days of no action, we follow it up with this via a PM

"It looks like your post got a reply recently. If the reply helped answer your question, can you please take 5 seconds to click the “Accept as Solution” button on the reply. This helps confirm that the question was answered and builds a knowledge bank of answers in the community.

If the reply did not answer your question, jump back into the conversation to keep it going.

Thanks for your contributions.

Best,

Ryan, AppD Community Manager"

 For the time being, we have decided not to allow any in email action as we were told this did not work very well. Which is why we added the tip to our email notification too. 

Replying direcrly in the thread is something we could try - our thinking here was we don't want to clutter the conversation with "admin" type of replies. 

I do see your side of this, it kind of puts them on blast and can also show the behaviors we are trying to encourage. 

[Wendy_S]

A technical community like ours, at HP. Technical communities have different challenges sometimes, if you compare to hip, niche, lifestyle & brand communities like FitBit, Sephora etc.

One of our bigger challenge is getting people to continue engagement or provide feedback on the answer offered.

You might want to try to tap into people's "do more good" feeling.

For example you might want to let them know.

"Did you know you might be able to help <insert amount> others with just 1 click"

Accepted solutions get viewed xx more and help xx users find the answer to their solution. Did this answer work for you, let others know by marking it as accepted.

You could also do some benchmark and see if you can find out how other communities do this today.

The easier it is for members to give the feedback and seeing the what is in it for me with a clear call to action will help but perhaps only a little bit.

Maybe you also want to focus on analysing topics that have accepted solutions vs the ones that don't? Perhaps the way the solution is offered, the speed of response, the tone of the answer and personal approach is the key to succes. I would think this might even be more powerful than trying to get users to accept a solution. 

Another observation we've had is that it also differs per country/culture how likely members are to "do something" like this. For example in Brasil, members tend to be very positive and don't mind giving this feedback whereas in the UK or US, the AS rate tends to be consistently lower.

One last thing before I go. We've been able to develop a page that shows topics that recently got marked with an Accepted Solution. There is no system that flags such a thing so we developed it ourselves. We've used it to see if customers would be necroposting in threads with a solution and also to be able to lock them as the AS was confirmed however you could also use this for your analysis or even to thank users openly for marking their answer and that this helps other. This might be another way to educate the members and drive desired behavior.

Hope this helps. I would love to bring in @BrianOblinger who has heaps of experience and I always love his POV.

😃

Good luck @i_am_ryan 

[BrianOblinger]

All good point so far. I agree with trying different messaging to see if something resonates with your audience more.

In my experience, modeling the behavior and building a culture of accepting solutions has been important. After the initial window has passed for the OP to accept the solution, having internal subject matter experts validate replies and mark them as solutions helps community members see "this is something we do here" and hopefully encourages them to do so as well. Obviously, you have to be careful about the overhead of this activity and make sure that the solutions really are solutions.

[Andre_Sostizzo]

We have engineers proactively mark posts as solutions when a valid one is provided by a community member.

The latest challenge has been to determine how many Solution should be coming from Support engineers or other employees versus other community members. Currently our estimate is that 25% being provided by employees overall should allow for other community users to participate and share their knowledge.

We are also questioning if implementing a waiting period before having employees answer posts is the best approach to staying at the "25% solutions provided by employee" target. 

Anyone has implemented a waiting period or worked out these targets? Thoughts?