How to measure and evaluate your community success

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EvaS
EvaS Member Posts: 18 Navigator
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edited March 2023 in Digital CS (Engagement Programs)

Hi GGR Members, another question regarding the community and here the GGR team can help for sure: how did you decide on the KPIs and how to measure/evaluate the success of your community over time?

Which KPIs/measurements are you tracking? I`m interested in real examples, please.

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  • Michelle Wideman
    Michelle Wideman Member Posts: 54 Navigator
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    @Heather Wendt @Jay Nathan, tapping you both in on this one as this is your bread and butter. @EvaS for me personally it has been different at various companies, for I've always tried to tie it to key company goals and objectives. Ex: the ability to reduce COGS, by leveraging the community to offload support cases, so track decrease in number of "How To" support cases, track reduction in support cases during onboarding for you're posting better documentation. Building customer advocacy/engagement, track how often your customers are engaging with community content. Driving new ACV-do you have a refer a friend program-track how many leads you are getting and close rates, historically these leads cost less and have a higher close rate.

  • Rich Rans
    Rich Rans Member Posts: 29 Contributor
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    Great comments by @Michelle Wideman , especially on tracking reduction in how to support cases.

    The only thing I'd add is tracking volume of community generated content. How many discussions, comments are being creating by community members. This is an leading indicator of long term health of the community. Tracking case deflection and feature adoption are great measures of the impact of your community.

    Richard Rans
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/richrans/
  • Heather Wendt
    Heather Wendt HLAdmin, Member Posts: 285 Gain Grow Retain Staff
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    Thanks for the tag @Michelle Wideman! To add to the great suggestions that have already been shared, I would consider the following:

    • How do retention rates and upsells compare for customers who are engaging in the community versus customers who are not? You could also compare CLV for each audience to see how community is impacting your customers.
    • If you are using Q&A modules, you can also track time to first answer/resolution
    • DAU/MAU (Daily vs Monthly Active Users) is a great metric because is shows stickiness (are your customers coming back)
    • UGC effectiveness (User Generated Content) - this demonstrates engagement by those contributing and increases trust among those who are consuming
    • Customer acquisition. How many customers came to the community before becoming customers
    • Number of suggestions from the community that have been incorporated into the product? Or quantity of issues that were identified through the conversations in community leading to bug fixes?
    • Advocates identified in the community that led to sales through referrals

    Not a KPI, but one of my favorite things to look at is search data. This was huge in alerting the org to potential gaps in information. We could look at the top search terms and then identify what content and resources we had for it. This allowed us to strengthen our self-service program more effectively.

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