ROI of any business outcome -â from collaborating on new products, to supporting ... behavior or business workflow, but communities have proven particularly ...
The Value of Community:
Sustaining Behavior Change to Drive ROI November 2014 Original research by:
With support from:
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Nearly every day, there are headlines and stories about the changing relationship between organizations and their customers, employees and other stakeholders. The maturation of community management as a discipline is helping to fundamentally alter that interaction. Online communities change how information is shared, viewed and extended – taking much of the information that was once shared privately between individuals and opening it up for a network of people to see. But this shift to community does more than simply make conversations more transparent to a wider audience -‐ it provides opportunities to: • • •
Generate more credible and specific information about the organization and its products and services in language that’s accessible and provides value to individuals. Connect customers to one another, enabling them to learn from, support and influence each other. Extend the organization’s ability to build authentic relationships with more individuals than it could in the past, since relationship building is traditionally resource intensive.
Communities have another characteristic that gives them special power, though. They are the most effective way to build sustainable behavior change, and this is critical to long-‐term success. This fact makes a community approach the ideal strategic operational choice for achieving almost any organizational goal. By changing the behavior of community members, organizations are able to do a lot more with a lot less, resulting in ROI in use cases such as: • Customer service, support and retention • Brand awareness and brand ambassador development • Market research and product innovation More with less? Sounds perfect. But there’s a catch -‐ communities rarely develop on their own. The ROI benefit for the community owner only comes to fruition if community members realize value from changing their behaviors, too. To generate value, your community members need to change how they access information, ask questions and share their experience. To achieve ROI from a new community space therefore requires potential members to see it as a valuable source of information, a comfortable place to ask questions and a rewarding outlet to share their experiences. None of that happens without investment – in technology, community management and programs to establish and reinforce those behaviors.
1 Copyright 2014: All rights reserved
At its heart, the impact of community on ROI can be boiled down to a single sentence.
“When a member wants to _____________, they will use the community to ___________, instead of doing ______________.” The link between behavior change and ROI The ROI calculation is familiar (perhaps too familiar) to community managers. Value generated by community – investment in a community Investment in community There’s nothing wrong with looking at ROI as an indicator of success – but looking at community as simply an input toward an output misses the heart of what communities need to do to deliver on it. Whatever the goal – attracting prospects, driving engagement and loyalty, reducing development costs, speeding time to market – the investment in community must be seen in terms of the behavior change you want to see, not just the outcome you desire. It’s by establishing and growing the behavior change that ROI will ultimately be delivered – and it’s the first marker or indicator of success that you will see. Let’s use the idea of improving prospect generation as an example. Higher Logic has found that successful online communities see a 25% increase in new prospect generation. At the heart of this is a change in the way that prospects behave. Instead of going to your website, exploring corporate messaging and filling out a lead form, they instead are directed to a community (or find it via search because of a question) where they are exposed to current clients, can ask detailed questions of credible peers and learn about the value of a product or service from people using them every day. By doing so, prospects both learn more and self-‐qualify before they fill out a form – making the information they share more valuable because they have already accumulated knowledge and had an opportunity to engage in conversations It is this change in the behavior of prospects that has value – not just that those prospects came through the community. Where do you start? Define your behavior change objectives Too often, we start our community efforts trying to set measurable goals before we ask the bigger question. What do you want the members of your community to do differently that reliably drives a different outcome? In the example above, the behavior change statement might read something like: “When a member wants to learn more about our services, they will use the community to ask relevant and specific questions of current clients, instead of relying on marketing materials that 2 Copyright 2014: All rights reserved
may not answer their questions, resulting in a higher likelihood they will reach out to seek information on services that truly meet their needs.” What changes is the behavior, not just the outcome. In our organizations this is what drives the ROI of any business outcome -‐ from collaborating on new products, to supporting customers to creating effective marketing. In order to increase the ROI, we need to look at the behaviors required to produce that outcome and how they can be changed to increase the return or decrease the cost. Applying a Community Approach to Specific Business Goals So how do you apply this approach? A community approach can be applied to virtually any behavior or business workflow, but communities have proven particularly effective in several specific use cases: • Improved Customer Support Programs: Using community to crowdsource customer support can not only achieve ROI by saving money on support infrastructure (up to 50 percent according to one Gartner report), it also creates stronger trust among customers, surfaces common problems and issues more effectively and allows the creation of an ever-‐growing set of resources and questions that provides new insights for both the organization and its customers. • Accelerated innovation and product refinements: A community platform provides companies with around-‐the-‐clock connections to their key customers and advocates. Co-‐creation, ideation and iterative feedback loops are powerful levers a community can provide for accelerating innovation, and can even reduce R&D costs by providing greater real-‐time access to customer feedback. • Stronger Brand Ambassadors: Building brand ambassadors goes beyond getting them excited about your product or service – the strongest ambassadors are those who feel their voices are heard by the brand itself. Communities are ideal settings both for growing exponentially the number of ambassadors, and for recognizing and engaging those customers and members who are your most passionate supporters. The list goes on. Community approaches can drive behavior change leading to ROI in almost any business case, but changing behavior requires more than short-‐term investment, it requires commitment. As your community grows, the opportunity to capture improved ROI sparked by changes in customer behavior accelerates rapidly.
So, do you want to harness the power of your crowd, participate in the collaborative economy, develop a reinforcing ecosystem around your brand or accelerate the delivery of value? Consider a community approach. 3 Copyright 2014: All rights reserved
