Stop Counting "Page Views": How to Prove Your KB’s Value to the CFO
Picture this: a budget meeting where a well-meaning Knowledge Manager proudly displays a chart showing "Article Views" trending upward and to the right.
Now, picture this: The CFO’s eyes glazing over.
One thing I’ve learned in my time as a well-meaning Knowledge Manager: Your CFO doesn't care about page views. They care about the bottom line. If you want to secure a budget for a new platform or a dedicated Knowledge Curator, you have to speak their language. You have to stop reporting on activity and start reporting on value.
Here is how to calculate the real ROI of your Knowledge Base.
The Hard Metrics: Deflection and Efficiency
When you walk into that finance meeting, bring two numbers: Ticket Deflection and Average Handle Time (AHT).
Ticket Deflection is the holy grail. If a customer finds the answer on your self-service portal, that is a support ticket that never happens. It’s a cost avoided entirely.
AHT Reduction is where you prove efficiency. If your agents can find the right answer in 30 seconds instead of digging through a digital landfill for 3 minutes, you’re saving money on every interaction.
Let’s look at the math. In my book, MVP KB, I use a fictional company, Moxy Solar, to illustrate this. Let’s say a contact center handles 505,000 requests per year. If you implement a knowledge strategy that drives a 10% reduction in AHT, you aren't just saving time, you’re saving over $200,000 annually.
That’s a number that wakes a CFO up.
The Soft Metrics: The Human Element
While the hard dollars get the budget approved, the "soft" metrics determine if your system actually survives. These measure the health of your operation and the sanity of your team.
Time to Proficiency: How long does it take a new hire to stop asking their neighbor for help and start answering tickets solo? I’ve seen organizations where onboarding took 16 weeks because new hires had to rely on "tribal knowledge." A solid KB can cut that ramp-up time significantly, sometimes by as much as 25%,.
Search Failure Rate: This is a metric I watch like a hawk. It tracks how often a user searches for a term and gets zero results (or clicks nothing). A high failure rate means your agents are frustrated and your customers are dead-ends.
Employee Engagement: When agents have the tools to do their jobs, they stay longer. When they don't, they burn out. High turnover is a hidden tax on your budget that a good KB can help alleviate.
A Warning: Don’t Die by the Spreadsheet
Finally, a word of caution. While I love a good ROI calculation, focusing solely on ROI can backfire. If you treat knowledge management purely as a cost-cutting exercise, you risk stripping away the human judgment and wisdom that actually solves complex problems.
You need to pair your data with anecdotal evidence. Capture the wins. Did a specific knowledge article help an agent save a high-value account from churning? Did a new troubleshooting guide help the engineering team identify a bug faster?
ROI gets you the funding, but the stories are what build the culture.
Ready to build a business case that actually gets signed? Let’s talk.
