Customer Communities

13Law 9: Community Should Drive Real Business Outcomes: Don't Get Fooled by Vanity Metrics—Demand Real Business Metrics

By Bas van Leeuwen, Valerie Molina, and Kenneth Refsgaard

It might seem obvious that a community program should drive tangible business outcomes. But that has not always been the case in the community space. As Erica Kuhl, an early community pioneer at Salesforce.com, told us, “I think not enough people in our industry are doing this; they're not yet speaking the language of business. We can't be talking about community the way we think about it because nobody understands it or necessarily cares. But if you speak to the business about their needs and what they will get in return—that gets that organization on board. Speak in dollars and cents. Speak in ROI. The most successful communities have done that well.”

In the first wave of enterprise communities we described at the beginning of this book, the value was almost always based on cost reduction through the deflection of support tickets. As the use cases for community have expanded in recent years, we have seen various approaches emerge when considering what business outcomes a community is contributing to. In our experience, most companies with a community program soon find themselves in one of the following three scenarios:

• Intrinsic belief in the value of community. In some organizations, there is a genuine and innate belief that engaging with customers and investing in community programs is highly valuable, ...