Late last year, we set a goal for 2012 to achieve a 100% response rate in our community-powered support forum. In other words, every user who asked a question in our forum should get a response. It felt like an ambitious goal when we set it, because only six months ago, we averaged around just a 50% response rate.
Average response rate has increased from ~50% to ~90% in just a few months.
A lot of things have changed since we set the goal, and they all contribute to this dramatic improvement in response rate:
- Our community has grown bigger and is a lot more active. This makes answering questions more fun than before.
- We have started to host bi-weekly SUMO days focusing specifically on answering forum questions. Initially pioneered by Michelle, nowadays they are run by Madalina.
- We have improved the start page by introducing basic browseability that we’ve previously lacked. This has reduced the number of new questions in the forum and is part of the massive project to revamp the information architecture of SUMO to significantly increase the number of users who can help themselves on our site.
The increased response rate has a number of other side-effects as well, such as an increased chance of the user getting back to us to let us know if the answer solved their problem. The solved-rate has more than doubled since November last year.
This is just the beginning. We have yet to fully roll out the revamped site and information architecture mentioned above. We also just introduced some new cool features to the forum that makes it easier to see how many questions are still unanswered:
SUMO regular Tobbi is working on a Canned Response feature that will make it much easier to quickly respond to questions. You can watch a screencast of the work in progress. It’s already totally awesome!
Big thanks to everyone in the SUMO community who work hard to respond to our users’ questions! Without you, this wouldn’t have been possible.
Speaking of the forum… what are you waiting for? It’s SUMO Day today, so head on over and answer some questions! :)