The solution rate for questions is an important metric to measure the service quality (and therefore customer satisfaction) of the community. If a questioner marks an answer/reply as “best answer”, then it is confirmation that the issue was solved. This way the company can safely assume that the user had a satisfactory experience and also didn’t need to call the hotline (i.e. deflected calls → saving the company money).
Also, questions that contain a marked “best answer” have a higher SEO value compared to questions without - and they are placed more prominently on Google (using Google Rich Results). This draws more people to the peer-approved “best answer” for their individual issue, therefore also leading to more customer satisfaction and deflected calls.
But: A lot of users who post questions in a community tend to not give feedback about which reply/answer solved their issue.
In our community we currently use manual follow-ups using the comments to guide questioners to mark “best answer”. If they don’t do it, then our moderators will mark the “best answer” based on their estimate and their experience. This workflow takes more effort and also only assumes that an issue has been solved with the comment/reply the moderator chose to mark “best answer”.
So we want to have a new email notification that pushes authors of questions to mark “best answer”.
Using the current email notification “post_create”, that is sent out to every user following a topic, can’t fulfill this task because we only want to target the author and push for actions only the author can take (mark “best answer”).
Therefore we propose a new email notification: The new email notification will be sent out to an author of a question every time a new comment/reply has been posted in that topic. The notification will ask the author to read the comment/reply (e.g. providing an inline preview) and will also ask the author to mark this comment/reply as “best answer”, if the issue has been solved by it.
To take it a step further, we propose that the author can mark the “best answer” directly from the email notification by providing a button (link) to click.
We believe that this will have a significant positive impact on the solution rate - and therefore on the customer satisfaction not only for that single user but also for all users that will find the question and solution via Google (or in the community).
