Why is support site analytics different?

Most websites are really not that difficult to analyze. E-commerce sites, for example, all have the same basic goals, and can be tracked pretty effectively with most analytics tools out-of-the-box.

Every support site is truly unique - different products, different customer base, different desired outcomes. There are no "standard" analytics, and most analytics tools don't provide much in the way of obviously useful data - there's no convenient report that says "how many of our visitors found what they were looking for".

Also, most support websites are deeply connected with offline support channels - you can't just analyze the website in a vacuum. Support divisions are usually data rich environments - call center data, customer survey data, customer demographic data... it's important to use that data wisely to assist in analyzing the web face of customer support.

What kinds of questions can support site analytics address?

How many of our visitors are successful? Where do they get frustrated? Which support tasks cause the most problems? How well does our site search work? Which knowledgebase items are good, which ones need serious help? How can we simplify our navigation? What are three things we could try to deflect more calls?

And that's just a beginning. Analytics can help you get a much better sense of your current site's strengths and weaknesses, and then prioritize what changes to make. Perhaps most importantly, analytics can help measure the impact of those changes on the quality of your customer support.

That sounds kind of overwhelming...

You can jump into the analytics deep end, or just tiptoe in. Unless you have a big website redesign looming, I tend to suggest starting with a more bite sized project. There's generally a useful role for analytics in even the smallest initiatives. Three recent examples: 1) working with a product group to overhaul their top 10 knowledgebase articles, 2) testing form instructions to increase completion rates, and 3) analyzing customer search terms to use their language in knowledgebase article titles.

The goal is to start incorporating web analysis into the regular work of your support team - adding a little data to make your jobs a little easier. What's currently on your plate? What data would help you move forward?