Hey there @Beachball3000 :)

Back in my days of managing a Salesforce community, Best Answers were particularly important to us as it was used as part of a formula that measured deflection / self-service. We had 2 measures:

1. Confirmed Self-Service - this was where a customer took a positive action to confirm that the community helped them solve a problem. This included marking a best answer
2. Assumed Self-Service - this was where we had good reason to believe that the community solved the problem. Not as good a metric, but really you’re looking for a trend rather than a number here.

This was an important distinction because, as you’ve found, customers take the path of least resistance (and that’s kind of the whole point, right?). Our process looked like this:

• A question is asked
• An answer is given
• Wait 48 hours
• Prompt customer to mark best answer if no best answer marked
• Wait 48 hours
• IF Best Answer is marked THEN Confirmed Self-Service
• OR
• IF no Best Answer is marked THEN add to queue for staff review

If the staff found that an answer given to the question was a good one, and that it was likely to solve the problem, they marked it as a Best Answer and tagged the customer in the post to say “Hey Mrs customer, we’ve marked this as the best answer but, if it’s not, let us know!”. At that point, we called it Assumed Self Service.

We chased Confirmed Self Service as much as possible but, at some point, you have to give in to the fact that some customers use the community in a transactional way - and not to be a part of the collective! This approach, at least, gives your community some credit in spite of the customer’s inaction.

As a Super User, this is also something I’ve noticed a lot as well. There are a few cases where users I’ve helped out came back to mark an answer as the best answer, but it’s more often than not down to myself, other Super Users and moderators to mark them.

Personally, I only tend to mark something as a Best Answer immediately if I feel that I have a good reason to do so. For anything else that’s not my own question, I generally leave it be. To give a few examples of when I tend to force it:

• Spam/scam threads - if they’re a Question type, I flag them to the mods immediately and then set a Best Answer as something alerting users that the links are spam and could be dodgy
• “Security Researchers” (more like script kiddies) - I tend to swoop in and claim a Best Answer warning the script kiddle to back off in a friendly way, such as reminding them that they shouldn’t be security testing the inSided platform without permission and then flag it for mod attention- I mainly do this to help prevent abuse of the platform (and to make sure a reasonable best answer is applied until a mod nukes the thread)
• Emergencies - I sometimes force a quick best answer in cases where I judge it to be needed. But I try to avoid having to do that

For some of these cases, I know that I won’t get to keep the credit for long, but I don’t mind anyway. If someone’s abusing the forum, I’d rather force a best answer onto myself so that the abuser can’t claim it and make things even more visible.

@Onomatopoeia & @Blastoise186 gentlemen, thank you kindly for your thoughts!

It’s interesting the methods that each of you’ve adopted from your specific roles (one as a moderator from the inside per se & the other as a member of the community, from the outside.) It’s becoming evident that we need to identify and promote members as Super Users to help mods & admins manage the ever growing community, to keep an eye on every nook & corner.

(Will someone be able to change this to a Conversation? I hadn’t meant this to be question but a discussion to learn more, and now find myself in a dilemma to mark one as a best answer myself, haha.)

@Beachball3000 appreciate this is a total left turn, but I was thinking about this last night (I know, I’m an addict) and started pondering on why Best Answers are important. I think there’s 3 reasons:

1. They’re an emotional reward for the person who took their time to answer the question. It’s recognition for their expertise, and it also contributes to other intrinsic reward systems in the community (points and badges!)
2. Best Answers add content to “Recently solved” widgets, which creates social proof that your community does in fact solve problems for people. That gives visitors confidence that they’ll get help if they ask a question in your community
3. They’re a metric you can use to measure how your community is meeting the needs of your customers.

For reasons 1&2, it does not matter who marked the best answer except in terms of the human resource required if your team have to do it. 

For reason 3, it does matter who marks the best answer. Only the person experiencing the problem can truly confirm that it’s solved.

With that, I think it’s important to ask why Best Answers are a KPI before you decide who should be marking them. If it’s a community health measure, I don’t think it matters who marks best answers once you realise what they’re good for: making community members feel helpful, helped and confident in the community’s ability to solve problems.

But if it’s a measure of self-service and deflection, you need your customers to be marking them for that measure to be trusted.