2 Ways To Show The Business Impact Of Customer Communities

Metrics such as acquisition and retention help businesses in evaluating their performance.  As an online community manager, you can use the same to gauge the impact your community has on your business.  The first step you need to take is to identify the most vital performance indicators for your business and how they contribute to building the business.

Firms have specific goals in mind when creating club websites and these goals are often similar to the vision of their business.  Perhaps you created the online community to reduce customer support costs or to bring awareness to your products.  Have you met those targets?  Aside from that, the following two comparisons will help you identify the changes that are initiated by the community.

 

Metrics are an easy way to show the business impact of your community.  All you need to do is compare your firm’s performance indicators (such as sales and customer support costs) prior to creating the community with those after the community.  For example, if you would normally gain ten new members per month but now you’re gaining fifteen; that would be a 50% increase.

 

Joining club websites is usually optional so there are some people that may stay inactive even after they join the community.  These types of customers never ask or answer questions and they never engage with the platform in any manner.  Such customers are not affected by the community and should not be counted as having an impact on the business.

Utilize these metrics to illustrate how the online community is changing business by gathering company data that shows retention, support costs, sales, and other performance indicators.  When engagement and metrics are compared, this data can be used to demonstrate to management how the business has improved since the online community was implemented.