Showing cross-functional community value to your support organization
Finding ways to show ROI for community is a constant discussion point in the community space. Whether you are fighting for existing or future resources, or maybe you have leaders who need to be convinced about the value of community, I know it’s top-of-mind for a lot of my fellow community peers (and myself too).
Of course, there are some inherent challenges with developing ROI for community. As typically a function that is not directly revenue generating, how do you create a system of metrics, reports, and dashboards to show the company-wide benefits and impacts as a result of the community?
I recently presented at Gainsight’s Pulse conference on the intersection of Customer Success Ops and Community Ops, and from it I briefly touched upon community metrics and how they can be used in tandem with metrics from other teams to show the cross-functional value community brings.
I’ve been thinking about this more and more, so I decided to make this a blog series and talk about showing cross-functional value community brings, starting with Support.
Support components within community
There are a handful of ways and places that Support shows up in Community:
- Activities in the Questions & Answers areas
- How many questions are being asked?
- How many questions have answers?
- How many questions have best answers?
- How many likes are there on question and answer posts?
- Content Helpfulness Scores — What percentage of knowledge base articles have responses to content helpfulness? How do the knowledge base articles rate with regard to content helpfulness?
- Site and page visits in knowledge base articles, questions, and answers. What is the site traffic to these areas of the community?
These are all metrics that you should be able to track from your community platform and possibly other tools that you have as part of your platform architecture. For example, if your knowledge base articles are all housed in the community, it could be as simple as taking data straight from your community platform and whatever site analytics tool you use (like Google Analytics), like this:
Alternatively, let’s say your knowledge base articles are house in your support tool rather than directly in the community. Your architecture for this portion may look like this:
These metrics listed above are indicators for community health and are important to track for the community team. However, layering them with metrics with the support team and matching them to their KPIs adds a whole new perspective and insight into the community value.
Meeting with support stakeholders
Now is about the time where you have either already had or are planning to have a meeting with your stakeholder from the support team. In your meeting, ask them questions like:
- What are your OKRs or KPIs for the [insert duration here, whether it’s quarter, year, second half of the year, etc.]?
- What platform do you use to get your data and create your reports and dashboards?
- What are you largest challenges right now?
- What are you current baseline metrics that you track?
- Do you currently have a cost on how much it costs to resolve each support case?*
- How many monthly cases do you receive?
- How long does it take to resolve each case?
- What is the current customer satisfaction of cases? (e.g. sometimes this can be referred to as a “How would you rate the support you received?” follow up to the case, see below screenshot for an example).**
- How do you track the case type or label/categorize cases?
*There are various methods to get a cost per support case resolved, and this is something the support team can work with the finance team to figure out. One simple way to calculate this number is to get the average time to resolve each case, the average salary of the members on the support team, and multiple the time by the salary. For example, if the average time to resolve each case is 37 minutes, and the average salary of the support team is $90,000/year (that is $0.78 a minute), that means each case costs on average 37 minutes x $0.78 per minute = $28.91 per case). See the “Math is fun” section below for the logic to get to the per minute salary cost.
**Here is an example of how customer satisfaction from a case resolution can be requested. This is a real example from one of the tools I use and was part of the email I received after the case was resolved.
Platform cross-functionality
Operationally, now is the time where you broaden the community architecture to include that of the support team, related to the metrics and potential areas of value that community provides. How do you take the metrics that are collected from the support team and overlay them appropriately with metrics collected from the community?
You may have to work with a data analyst or get help from the support team (haha, support from the support team) to put some of these platforms together, make sure they’re talking to one another, and putting various metrics together with one another. Ideally, you have a single place where you can get a wholistic picture of community and support metrics together.
Connecting the dots
Now is the time you start thinking about the overlap and how community metrics can help drive achievement of the support team’s OKRs or KPIs, and how community can show an impact on the baseline metrics that were discussed with the support team stakeholder. Though this might vary a bit per organization and per team, here are a few examples:
⬆ Case deflection
Probably the most discussed metric for support and community, there are a few ways to report on this.
Data you need:
- Cost per resolved support case
- MoM number of resolved support cases
- MoM number of Answers to Questions, Best Answers Marked, Positive Content Helpfulness Scores
From here, calculate the total dollars spent by your company for resolved cases month over month. Then calculate the total dollars that would have been spent by your company on issues solved by the community (you can make a few assumptions here that answers, best answers, and positive content helpfulness scores are indicators that community members were able to find their solution through the community). Get the difference, and you can deduce the total dollars saved MoM from the community in case deflection.
You can use this table to show things like:
- $’s saved in case deflection to the community (averaging $3618.57 per month)
- % decrease in amount of time taken to respond to support cases
- % decrease in support center costs (in the example provided above, 67.24% saved)
⬆ Customer satisfaction
I personally feel like this is an underrated benefit for support stemmed from the community. At Venafi, we recently did a survey asking customers how they prefer to get support when they have questions about the product. 77% of respondents said they prefer to go to the knowledge base articles, product documentation, and the community before reaching out to support. It was resoundingly clear that customers prefer self-service, being able to find the answers themselves and at their own time, rather than reaching out to a support agent and waiting for a response.
Data you need:
- Content helpfulness score (from the community)
- Page views for Q&A components of the community (this is helpful to have, since not everyone will submit a content helpfulness score)
- Case resolution customer satisfaction (which I discussed and showed a screenshot of above)
- Customer health score (or whatever customer health metric you use. Yes, I know this is a Customer Success metric! But it helps provide insight into customer satisfaction. It’s all related).
From here, you can show correlations between community engagement and its impact on customer satisfaction.
Now, I made a few additions to the main information above. This is the main information, but in order to better show the impact in a graph form, you want to combine the overall community impact. To do this, I did two things:
- Page view scale: In this example, the page views were in the hundreds, which skews the graph a lot (that y-axis would range quite a bit).
- Community support score: Not an “official” community metric you hear about at all, but for the sake of this example, I added the content helpfulness score, page view scale, and case resolution customer satisfaction score.
Then I created the graph:
Other Support metrics
In addition to case deflection and customer satisfaction, you’ll want to chat with your support team to figure out what metrics are important to them and how community can help support attaining those metrics (as I mentioned above). These may vary from team to team, but there are two other metrics I’d like to provide here as examples.
Time to solution — The amount of time it takes for a customer to get the answer they need. By looking at the average time for a support case to be resolved (including waiting time for responses back and forth) and comparing it to session times on Q&A pages in the community relative to content helpfulness score, you can show the difference in time to solution. People who go to the community to seek their answers will find what they need in a matter of minutes, compared with people who email support and then have to wait the standard 24–48 hour SLA (service level agreement) before an agent even responds. Then fingers crossed they have your answer and aren’t just emailing back to get additional information or clarification, thus re-starting the SLA cycle.
Case prioritization — With an emphasis on directing customers to the community and using the community as a primary hub and resource for customers, it allows more time for the support team to focus on the more complex cases — the ones that might need a deeper dive or troubleshooting. It also allows the support team to focus on the higher priority cases, perhaps those from top-level accounts or the ones who have paid for an additional support plan. With the community data and data on the types of cases the support team handles, you could show over time that the community allows those important cases or top-tier cases to be better prioritized and handled faster.
Next steps you could take
If you’ve made it this far in the article, congrats! Scrolling up to check on my work, it’s a doozie. So much math! 🤪
Being able to relate and think in the shoes of your stakeholders helps solidify the impact that community has across the business, and customer support is just one element of it. I hope to go over the other departments in future posts.
As you start thinking about embarking on this journey, be sure to start with what you know about about your community metrics. Know what you are able to report on and what might need some work — perhaps you have to take a look at your tech stack first. Once you feel like you’re ready from the community data side, get that meeting scheduled with your support team stakeholder.
Additionally, as one last takeaway, I’d like to provide three small Call to Actions (CTAs) that you can start looking into as well.
- Labels and case categories: Conduct audits to see what people are emailing support about, and see if it can become new content in the community to help others.
- Content helpfulness audits: What knowledge base articles may not be performing well and can be edited to show more relevant and helpful information.
- Site page visits: What pages aren’t being visited anymore and can potentially be archived? Alternatively, what pages are very popular and visited a lot and perhaps can be bookmarked or highlighted better.
Math is fun
In the example mentioned earlier in this article, we said the average salary for a support team member was $90,000 per year. Here is the logic to get to the salary per minute:
- $90,000 / year
- $7,500 / month (12 months a year)
- $375 / day (20 working days a month)
- $46.88 / hour (8 working hours a day)
- $0.78 / minute (60 minutes in an hour)
And because you made it to the end, here is the obligatory Yoshi picture, celebrating Halloween as a candy corn cutie.
