At the recent Online Community Business Forum, Joe Cothrel and I presented on Online Community ROI.

Specifically, we proposed the notion that there was enough publicly available data and likely enough data internally that most companies could put together a model that describes the ROI of its’ Online Community Investments.

Session 3: Online Community ROI
Publicly available stats (compiled by Joe)

– 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)

From the Forum One OC ROI Survey (April 2007):
– Only 22% of respondents had clear ROI Model
– 42% had staff of 1-5 people
– 49% Report Monthly to Mgmt
– Establishing ROI Model was a priority for most respondents in the near term

Full powerpoint deck here.