Perfecting the customer experience is important for any business. Getting customers what they need comes in a variety of ways including dedicated support and product help, or even ensuring they’re well-equipped to satisfy their self-service needs. The latter has evolved over time in a digital world that’s meant customers often find the solutions to their queries without any additional manual or physical support. It’s why Googling is a verb.
A key way for businesses to understand what they’re offering to customers, in both experience and support, is with a completion rate. A completion rate lets businesses understand if customers are getting what they need from the content, support, or product materials (to name a few) available.
Ahead, we’ll go through how and why a completion rate is, what it measures, typical users including individual and team success, and how generative artificial intelligence (AI) can help increase completion rate metrics.
What is completion rate and what does it measure?
In both customer service and experience, identifying and measuring completion rate is significant. This metric gauges the effectiveness and user-friendliness of your self-service resources, which include items such as help articles, FAQs, interactive guides, and troubleshooting tools for support.
In other cases, a completion rate can determine if a customer has completed a task after finishing content— i.e. if they’ve filled out a “contact us” form, or subscribed to a mailing list pop-up, at the end of an article.
To calculate completion rate you must take the number of active users who completed the goal or goals and divide by the total number of users who have activated the service.
A high completion rate often implies that your customers can find what they need, solve their problems, and accomplish their goals. For organizations that prioritize customer service, this becomes a vital factor to consider.
Benchmarks for completion rate metrics
A decent completion rate benchmark is very dependent on the type of action you’re requiring of your customers (i.e. reading content to the end, watching a full video or webinar, filling out a form, etc.) Usually, the industry may be a factor as well for what is a clear indication of a good completion rate.
A general rule is that anything around 75-80% is a good completion rate.
Tracking completion rate
In order to measure completion rate, you first need to track it. There are a few tools that can help that measure sessions, duration, and events. With certain tools, such as Google Analytics, metrics can get as granular as possible or broadened to capture the overall picture of what users are doing and how they engage with self-serve content and tools.
Measuring completion rate continuously, and reviewing it consistently on a monthly or quarterly basis is important to track trends and make necessary adjustments. In some cases, it might be necessary to give special attention to certain parts of the business following any significant changes to your self-service resources. These could be such as launching a new help center, implementing a new chatbot, or publishing a new guide for users. In some cases, a surge in live support inquiries or a decrease in customer satisfaction could trigger a deeper examination of your completion rate.
Who uses and measures completion rate metrics?
Completion rate metrics provide useful information across several departments at companies. Many will think marketing first, sales second. But, if looked at primarily as a customer experience metric, customer experience teams will find completion rates exceptionally insights about the content, tools, and technologies their users go to for help.
Typically, the following roles can benefit from measuring and understanding completion rates:
- Customer support managers
- Knowledge base managers
- Self-service strategists
- Customer experience representatives
Completion rates provide invaluable insights to help guide decision-making and inform strategies for enhancing self-service resources.
How completion rates impact teams on a broad and individual level is important to understand as well.
How completion rate impacts individual contributor success
When customer service representatives and support agents are working with their customers and users, a useful way to understand how well they enact that support. With a high or even improved completion rate metric, that signals to individual contributors fewer repetitive queries and more time to handle complex issues that require human intervention. This not only boosts their productivity but also leads to greater job satisfaction.
How completion rate impacts team success
Customer service teams at large are always working to improve their support for customers. That doesn’t always mean directly engaging with them but providing the tools to help, like digital AI assistants and chatbots, guides, or articles. With a high completion rate at a team level, this signals an enhancement of efficiency for the entire customer service team. This may help reduce the load on live support and allow the team to focus on complex, high-value tasks. It can also foster a culture of continuous improvement as teams collaborate to optimize self-service resources.
How completion rate impacts overall company success
For the wider organization, improved or high completion rate means increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. When customers are empowered to solve issues independently, there is both the satisfaction of a task done well, and that the correct resources were there in the first place.
Additionally, this can lead to cost savings by reducing the demand for live support, and leaning into the helpful world of AI-powered chatbots.
Strategies to improve completion rate using generative AI and automation
Generative AI can be incredibly powerful in legitimizing customer self-service. Consider the following strategies for deploying AI tools and how it can help businesses and customers like from guiding customers through self-service tools to automation to the data a company can get from AI.
1. AI-powered self-service tools
Consider deploying AI chatbots or virtual assistants to guide users to the right resources, including FAQs, contact information, articles, and more, to help improve completion rate.
2. Concise, data-driven insights
Machine Learning algorithms are able to analyze usage patterns and identify common stumbling blocks for customers, and suggest enhancements to your self-service resources.
3. Automated collection of feedback
Implement AI-powered surveys or feedback mechanisms to gather user experiences and feedback on self-service resources. These insights can inform optimizations and improvements.
Conclusion
Getting it right for your customers is always the goal. Whether it’s the product or service they needed, or the information on how to use that product or service, companies need to consistently prioritize customer satisfaction. There are ways to make sure customers are empowered to do these tasks on their own—and companies can measure that for their own benefit. Understanding why and how a completion rate metric is necessary to your customer service efforts is crucial to growing and maintaining an excellent customer-oriented business.
