Dual Success Metrics

In this new era of technical writing, you’ll often hear me advocate for seeing the AI bot as your customer. But does that mean ignoring your human customers?

Absolutely, dispassionately, and resolutely not.

For the best experience possible, your team must focus on AI bot’s impact *without* neglecting the impact your docs have on customers directly.

If you take my team for instance, we average a 65% resolution rate using the AI bot, but our self-serve resolution rate hovers at around 98% or higher. Let me break that down.

AI bot resolution rate: Covers only the conversations that the AI bot handled.

Self-serve resolution rate: Includes both resolved AI bot conversations *and* customers who accessed the articles directly and left without opening a support ticket.

Those two numbers end up telling us a really interesting story. Even though the AI bot doesn’t resolve every conversation, it is okay because the entire self-serve ecosystem we created (help center + AI bot) is catching nearly every customer. That all adds up to a massive number of tickets deflected away from our support team.

This is why it is always important to look at the whole, and not just a part. The AI bot will give your team buckets of valuable information. You will be able to easily see unanswered questions, trending issues, and recurring topics. But if you become hyper focused on filling those gaps for bot ingestion alone while ignoring the readability and user experience of your help center, you will inadvertently create a faulty self-serve ecosystem and see fewer tickets deflected overall.

If you are currently in a technical content team that is implementing an AI chatbot or have already done so, and you are not seeing the impact you hoped for, ask yourself this: Am I considering the whole?

This is what I know, this is where we are now. There is no one strategy that works, and no magic wands in this industry. If you do not deliver a self-service ecosystem that ensures the technical content works for everyone, ticket deflection will drop and your support team will suffer for it for it.