5 vital Knowledge Base KPIs for better Self-Service

Knowledge Management is a never-ending process; continuous development in your organization means the knowledge base must be constantly updated with new information.

It’s important to regularly measure the health of your knowledge base and your knowledge base KPIs for effective knowledge management. How do you do this?

How to maintain a healthy Knowledge Base?

By continuously monitoring your Knowledge Base KPIs, you’ll discover which parts of your Knowledge Management process need more attention: make a monthly report of this.

Let’s take TOPdesk as an example. I work at Support here as a technical product consultant, and this is how we do these kind of assessments of the knowledge base.

Has your organisation not yet started with implementing knowledge management?

Is your knowledge base actively used?

There is nothing more annoying than finding old or incorrect information when searching for an answer. That’s why it’s important that the knowledge base contains up-to-date information.

To ensure this, first make sure that all operators actively use the knowledge base. In addition, you want the supporters to actively create new knowledge items and change existing articles. We also zoom in on the level per group of operators / practitioners so that we know which colleagues should receive extra attention.

Measuring the health of your knowledge base (items)

To find out whether the knowledge system is actively used, we perform a number of periodic measurements:

• Number of new knowledge items compared to the total number of knowledge items and total number of reported reports. With this measurement, we check whether new knowledge is being added to the knowledge base.

• Percentage of knowledge items updated in the last months. By comparing this measurement per month, you can see at a glance how up-to-date the knowledge system is.

• Knowledge use percentage per subcategory. This measurement shows which subjects are underexposed in the knowledge system.

• Number of knowledge items that are assessed as useful or not useful. This measurement tells you how end users assess the knowledge. Do they rate your knowledge items as ‘not useful’?

• Percentage of incidents resolved with a new knowledge item compared to older knowledge items. This measurement indicates whether end users find are finding knowledge items. If your percentage is high, then new questions are mostly coming in about new issues. A low percentage tells us end users are not finding existing knowledge items, even though these are already available for a longer time.

Just getting started with targets for your department? These are some service desk KPIs to consider.

Share knowledge better in your organization

Want more inspiration on building better knowledge bases? Download our Knowledge Management e-book for tips and tricks and a way to calculate your time and cost savings.