ROI on Community?

Brian O'Keeffe
Brian O'Keeffe Member Posts: 151
100 Comments 25 Insightfuls 25 Likes Photogenic
in Metrics & Analytics
It's hard to define a specific ROI for community? How have you answered it?

Comments

  • Heather Wendt
    Heather Wendt HLAdmin Posts: 225 admin
    25 Likes 10 Comments 5 Insightfuls Photogenic
    @Brian O'Keeffe another great question! There are a lot of metrics that community platforms help you gather, but aligning them to other departments is always the trick.

    Best way to start is to work with each department to figure out what they care about (new business, upsells, awareness, ticket reduction), and look at the analytics you pull that can be ties to those goals. It isn't the same for every leader, so understanding their main priorities is key.

    Some potential segments to focus on:

    Support/Success
    • CSAT - are customers finding solutions on your community (resources), increasing their 'happiness' with your product?
    • Ticket Reduction - measuring first touch access (FAQs, etc) and determining the impact on reach outs to customer support
    Product
    • Direct customer input on what they want to see
    • How many ideas are coming in from your customers?
    Acquisition
    • Awareness focused, so looking at resource access, referrals, event attendance and location within the funnel
    • Customer leads - how many customers in the funnel accessed community resources or joined the community?
    Content
    • Company or user-generated
    • Access and application
    • Best practices
    Engagement
    • Increased customer loyalty - can you align membership with the community (especially engaged membership) with retention?
    • How are upsells of engaged customers compared to the unengaged?
    There are loads of examples of how companies have done this well and provided that important ROI measurement, but it is definitely a process! I think it is a good thing to start with one of the most pressing goals and work towards aligning and reporting on that, and then continue building for other goals.

    Hope this helps!


  • Jay Nathan
    Jay Nathan HLAdmin, Member Posts: 108 admin
    Third Anniversary 10 Comments Photogenic 5 Insightfuls
    Great question and timely as I am working on clarifying the same thing. Here’s a model I am pondering for customer success scalability. There are some assumptions to clarify/validate in this model, but here’s how I’m thinking about it. What do you think of this?


  • Brian O'Keeffe
    Brian O'Keeffe Member Posts: 151
    100 Comments 25 Insightfuls 25 Likes Photogenic
    Thank you @Heather Wendt and great meeting you last week in Boston. You too, @Jay Nathan. I appreciate your update too. Nice meeting you in September in Miami! 
  • Jay Nathan
    Jay Nathan HLAdmin, Member Posts: 108 admin
    Third Anniversary 10 Comments Photogenic 5 Insightfuls
    Yes! Hopefully we get to meet again soon. 
  • Successful_lion
    Successful_lion Member Posts: 5
    Name Dropper First Comment
    Jay Nathan said:
    Great question and timely as I am working on clarifying the same thing. Here’s a model I am pondering for customer success scalability. There are some assumptions to clarify/validate in this model, but here’s how I’m thinking about it. What do you think of this?


    Jay, this is incredibly helpful. Could you expand on how you got these numbers?

Categories