Problem 1: Admins can't control how vote counts display, leading to negatively biased customer perception about article content.
Users can vote on articles as "Helpful" or "Unhelpful", but admins cannot choose whether the votes are displayed as part of a total (ex.: "10 users found this helpful" instead of "10 out of 30 found this helpful".)
As a customer, I'm more likely to have an optimistic view of an article 10 people found helpful full-stop, and I'm more likely to read the content.
This is a big psychological contrast to the second, extremely negative example where I can see that 70% of other users found the article UNhelpful. Seeing the "out of" count makes me unlikely to bother reading the article, even if it contains the answer I need.
Problem 2: "Unhelpful" votes are ultimately unhelpful and not actionable for admins.
Although I can pull a report with my "helpful" and "unhelpful" votes on any given article, this data is utterly useless because it leaves me blindly guessing about why a customer voted negatively on an article.
Is the article too long? Not long enough? Is it missing a key piece of information? Is there a broken link in my content? Was the article published in the wrong section? Is the labeling and keywording poorly optimized? Is the customer simply clicking "unhelpful" because they're having a bad day? — I have no idea, because I have zero insight into why a user voted the article as "unhelpful."
Admins should be able to:
- Toggle off the "out of" portion of the vote count on articles, so that only "x found this helpful" displays to End Users.
- Gather additional feedback from users who vote articles as "unhelpful," including:
- A comment body (reportable in Explore) and
- (optional to End User) the User fields to collect name + email address, which gives us the opportunity to follow up with the user if needed.
There are half a dozen user-submitted guides in the Community about how to do these things with custom code, but most are many years old and unfortunately none of those custom solutions work as of Nov 2023. Additionally, we can't get Zendesk Support's assistance on this because at this time, the goal is considered too custom.
These features are basic requirements for any Help Center feedback module; they really should be included in Guide natively.
TL;DR: Article votes should not actively amplify negative perceptions about our articles or our brand — and — if negative votes are not actionable, negative vote counts have no practical purpose.
We truly value customer feedback and your voice and votes in the product feedback topics in the community help influence future Zendesk functionality.