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How to measure a knowledge base beyond its article count
Attach rate, reuse and deflection: the metrics that show whether knowledge is actually working.
For years we measured knowledge bases by size. Thousands of articles look good on a slide, but they say nothing about whether they help resolve an incident. A large, outdated knowledge base costs more than it returns: agents stop trusting it and go back to asking the person next to them.
Three questions before any KPI
- Can people find it? If an agent or user can’t reach the article in two or three searches, for practical purposes it doesn’t exist.
- Do people use it? An article nobody links to a ticket isn’t helping the operation.
- Does it resolve? The goal isn’t reading; it’s closing the incident faster and on the first contact.
The metrics I recommend
- Attach rate: the share of resolved incidents with a linked article. It measures how knowledge is really used day to day.
- Article reuse: how many times the same article is linked. It shows which articles carry the operation and which are dead weight.
- Zero-result searches: what people look for and don’t find. It’s the most honest backlog you will ever get.
- Self-service deflection: cases users solved on their own in the portal, without opening a ticket.
- Effect on FCR and MTTR: compare first-contact resolution and mean time to resolve for incidents with and without a linked article.
Quality: the metric nobody sees
Usage numbers look good on a dashboard, but quality holds everything else up: articles reviewed on time, feedback addressed and an accountable owner for every article. That’s why we added a report button inside each article: the user flags a broken link or an outdated step, the owner gets the task and the loop closes with evidence.
How to start
- Take a baseline of attach rate by support group.
- Every month, review the 20 most frequent zero-result searches and turn them into articles or search synonyms.
- Give every article an owner and a review date.
- Report on a monthly dashboard with the same definitions every time, so the trend stays comparable.
A knowledge base isn’t measured by what it holds, but by what it resolves.