Top 10 KPIs for Tracking Support Communities

Setting up and maintaining a large online support community costs on average about $350K/year, but companies often recoup more than that amount annually through service/support savings. Typically, companies make this assessment by tracking KPIs related to community member activities. In our latest report, Driving Company Strategy Through Support Communities, we identify 10 leading KPIs that organizations examine to track the progress and value of support communities.

These KPIs enable community leaders to understand key correlations – for example, between active customer Q&A discussions and solution views, or between solution views and deflected tickets – and then translate that data into support/service savings.

Focus on “Views”
One profiled community in the report (Sophos) has 1,500 hundred active members each month on their community site, but that’s only part of their story.  They also have over 750,000 unique sessions and 370,000 unique users each month!  In other words, each Q&A discussion is viewed many times by quiet, non-active community members.  Another community manager whom we interviewed said that the number of these site visits or solution views helps him determine the value of having a dedicated engineer answer questions on a Q&A customer forum. Based on his experience and metrics, a question answered by an expert that gets 20-30 solution views leads to a deflected ticket, underscoring the added value of professional advice in the community.

We found, however, that community managers have limited means to measure the impact of their communities on satisfaction, loyalty, churn and revenue generation. This is the case even as the majority of marketing and community leaders (57%) maintain that competitive advantage means retaining current customers. Recognizing this limitation, we have created a model for determining community impact that combines both service and hard-to-measure loyalty KPIs.

Leader Networks Support Community Value Model
For the purposes of our model, we have assumed that a typical organization with a large support community has the following parameters:

• Revenues/profit margin: $2B/10%
• Churn rate: 25% of annual revenue
• Online community members/page views: 250,000 per month /3M per year
• Community costs: $350K per year
• Customer support team: 300 employees

For more details on the model and supporting case studies, download the full report: Driving Company Strategy Through Support Communities