Web support best practices, benchmarks and observations from the 2019 ASP Top Ten Awards competition are now available in two new report from the ASP.
By Al Hahn, Executive Director, ASP
For the last 21 years, ASP has held a competition for the Top Ten Best Support Websites. The competition has become a virtual state-of the-art for self -support websites. If you would like to learn more about ASP Top Ten Web Site Awards, click here.
We changed the scoring this year to put more emphasis on user experience, access to different languages and disabilities, and metrics. The result was a noticeable drop in overall scores. Essentially, we raised the bar, which was exactly what we intended.
We changed the way the reports are structured. Instead of one large 145-page report with everything. We split is up into bite-sized chunks. There is an overall report with trends and Observations from the 2019 Competition, another with Best Practices and Benchmarks, and the essays are now being published as individual winning site profiles.
You can now choose more exactly what you want to read about, or you can still read all the reports. There is a brief excerpt for each report, so you can sample what you might get.
If you are an ASP member you can access these reports for free. Add the reports to your cart and check out, members will not be charged.
If you are not an ASP member can purchase any report, the price is $360 for one report, although individual membership is only $180 for a full year and you then get all our reports, even back years. Learn about ASP Membership programs.
There is quite a bit of new content on our site now, and we have announced a partnership with ServiceXRG for more research, so stay tuned for more. ASP has been expanding over the last year or two and we are changing our site a bit at a time. We want to become the hub of the support community, so you can expect more changes to come.
Featured Report: ASP Top 10 Web Sites – Best Practices and Benchmarks
To be recognized as one of the industry’s Top Ten Best, web sites are evaluated based on 25 practices and characteristics across five performance categories. Each web site is personally judged by a team of support industry experts. Judges evaluate each web site and provide a performance score for each of the 25 web support attributes. Leading support web sites are recognized by the ASP as one of the top ten best. The Top Ten Best Web Support Performance Categories and maximum scoring values are introduced and defined in this report.
Featured Report: ASP Top 10 Web Sites – Observations from the 2019 Competition
This report introduces some of the notable trends and observations from the 2019 Top Ten Web Support Competition. Here are some of the notable observations from the essays of the winning sites. They are listed below and explained in this report.
- Integration of training, and documentation in self-support.
- Companies are beginning to move away from call deflection as a prime metric, or at least as the primary way to justify budgets.
- Most popular tasks metrics lead to improved downloads and license key searches
- Acquisitions and spinning companies back out complicate self-service websites.