ROI of Online Communities

Maggie has a great set of statistics from her ROI of Communities Series. Pardon the total duplication of the stats but I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose these numbers.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004)
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKinsey, 2000)
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKinsey, 2000)
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)

As a community manager I myself I am always looking for concrete statistics to help explain why there is value for companies to build online communities.

I also found The Online Community Research Network (OCRN) from Maggie’s comment feed. OCRN is a collaborative effort of online community professionals to better understand the principal challenges of building and managing online communities .
The also offer the following free reports that are helpful

- Online Community Metrics (free download)
- Online Community ROI (free download)

Lots of data to digest but very good stuff.

(via Anne)

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Technorati Tags: community building, Online Community, Online Community Research Network, ROI

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