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HE L P S TR E AM

WHI T E P A P E R

1•

THE ROI OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT COMMUNITIES

The ROI of Customer Support Communities

A Comparative Analysis of Different Approaches

Background

The evolution of online business communities has been rapid over the last five years. As with theearly stage of any emerging market, understanding the return on investment (ROI) of online businesscommunities has undergone a tremendous amount of change. Initial implementations of communi-ties for customer service have been done as standalone applications with no integration into othercustomer support systems or business processes. Current generation solutions offer fully functionalonline communities that are tightly integrated with traditional case management and knowledge basecapabilities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relative ROI benefits of different approachesto implementing customer service communities.

Introduction

Understanding ROI is critical when evaluating any customer service community. The results of anROI analysis can be used to determine whether to deploy a customer service community, how muchan organization can afford to invest in their community initiative, and how to go about improvingan existing customer service community effort further.This paper examines the relative ROI of various approaches to implementing customer servicecommunities. It delves into the challenges of accurately measuring ROI of traditional businesscommunities, the components that make up ROI, some typical results that can be expected, andhow to go about calculating the ROI of your customer service community.In order to explain the relative ROI of various approaches to customer service communities, thispaper will describe and present examples of four different customer support models. The data usedto calculate the relative ROIs for this paper was gathered, where possible, from companies deployingthese various customer support models. Where actual data was not available, estimates were madefrom data gleaned from publicly available case studies.Much of this data was collected automatically by the Integrated ROI Waterfall Report inHelpstream’s community-based customer service software. We believe this data is unique andmore accurate for calculating true ROI as only Helpstream offers a solution that seamlesslyintegrates both data and business processes across community, knowledge base, and case manage-ment. This paper will discuss how calculating ROI in traditional, standalone business forums orcommunities is difficult, largely due to the problem of matching Incidents to one of these channels.

Types of Customer Service Communities

The evolution of online communities for customer service has been rapid over the last five years.As experience with communities in the service function has matured, a lot has been learned aboutthe most effective ways to deploy communities in order to maximize their ROI. This paper looks atfour different customer support models for comparison. There are a number of variations to thesefour models, but these capture the range of benefit and cost characteristics that are useful whenassessing ROI potential.

community-driven customer service

The four models of customer support this paper explores are:

Traditional Case Management & Knowledge Base Model

Standalone Forum with Case Management & Knowledge Base Model

Integrated Community & Case Management & Knowledge Base Model

Integrated Business Process & Community & Case Management & Knowledge ModelA description of these four models follows.

Traditional Case Management and Knowledge Base

It’s important to start from a base case that has no community and represents the traditional modelof case management (or what’s often called “assisted resolution”) together with a knowledge basefor deflection. This enables us to understand the baseline ROI for a customer service system beforecommunity has been added. In this model, customers are encouraged to search the knowledgebase or “KB” prior to submitting a case in hopes of finding the answer to their problem beforethey have to ask.This is often referred to as “self-service” or “deflection” because whenever the customer can find theiranswer in the KB, it is usually very inexpensive, whereas when a customer service representative(CSR) must become involved via case management in resolution, the costs skyrocket. Typical indus-try figures for the cost of assisted service are usually in the range of $20-40 per incident. For somehighly complex incidents, there are documented instances of a resolution costing hundreds of dollars.Industry averages for deflection are in the range of about 40%, meaning that a successful KBimplementation can lead 40% of incidents to self-service so that no CSR needs to be involved. Theprincipal cost is the authoring of the KB content. Authoring costs are dependent on the complexityof each individual KB article and the hourly rates employed. For purposes of this ROI discussion,we’ll assume a cost per article of about $40, so an article costs about what two assisted serviceresolutions would cost. Any article that solves more than two problems has a net positive ROI.Later, we will compare the ROI of investing in more KB content versus community participation.The differences are striking.

Independent Community with Case Management and Knowledge Base

The first attempts to bring community to customer service have involved independent andun-integrated forums. There are definite benefits to forums or communities even when un-integrated,but there are problems with an un-integrated approach.

HE L P S TR E AM

WHI T E P A P E R

2•

THE ROI OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT COMMUNITIES

Having multiple options with little guidance or linkage between the options creates confusion forcustomers, who see websites that have a grab bag of tools available for resolving their problem. Thecommunity, knowledge base, and case submission are all presented on an equal footing in the Webportal. Customers don’t know where to start, and very often wind up just trying all three.Customer service professionals have a hard time knowing where to spend their time as well. The userinterfaces for each tool are different. There is no way to conveniently move as the situation calls forbetween each of the tools. Many times incidents that start out in the community may need to betransformed into cases when they don’t get good handling. The traditional monitoring and workloadbalancing tools available to agents for cases are absent with these community tools, so the agent neverknows where the balls are dropping without constantly checking multiple silos.One of the biggest limitations of the model is that it’s almost impossible to measure ROI accuratelybecause it is extremely difficult to accurately track what happens to an incident when customers arepresented with disparate tools to solve their problem without double counting, undercounting, orotherwise misunderstanding what’s really going on.The problems with determining ROI from an un-integrated model include:

Difficulty Identifying Which Community Threads are Incidents

A lot of community activity is unrelated to incidents and requires no possibility of assisted service.Un-integrated systems are left with manual monitoring to identify which threads need attention. Tocompute ROI, some community vendors recommend approaches like manually reviewing all threadsfor a week and classifying them according to content. This is a hopelessly manual task that producesone data point for one week of activity after a great deal of effort. The vendor would have you believethis result is representative, but it isn’t. Once you see real time results from integrated reporting,you will see that community data is just as noisy as any other kind of customer service data, and themetrics need constant monitoring that is impossible with this kind of system.

Difficulty Identifying Whether the Incident Was Answered,and Where the Answer Came From

Here again, a lack of integrated reporting makes it impossible to get real answers to these criticalquestions. Vendors recommend that customers monitor submission of new threads and delete anysubmissions that come from accounts that also submitted a case on the same day. First, goingthrough that process by hand is painful, and setting up an integrated reporting solution to do thesame thing is expensive and still produces low quality data. Second, it completely disallows thepossibility that the account may actually have more than one problem in the same day.The question of determining whether an answer was obtained is also a sticky one. In one case, thevendor relied on a random survey in the forums that asked whether the visitor’s question had beenanswered by the forum. The assumption was made that the percentage responding positively wasrepresentative.

HE L P S TR E AM

WHI T E P A P E R

3•

THE ROI OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT COMMUNITIES