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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Hey Mark – thanks so much for the mention, I was lucky enough to find these stats via Bill Johnston, and I feel the same way about their value!