Calculating the ROI of Customer Engagement

Most current definitions of engagement are bimodal – someone is either engaged or they ‘re not...a limited view that hampers our ability to manage engagement in meaningful ways...

Community management is the discipline of building technical and social environments in such a way that individuals can easily organize and collaborate to achieve an objective... Engagement is a set of behaviors, not a switch. It needs to be calibrated to business goals...

define these engagement behaviors ... Work Out Loud framework... helps ... measure the culture in their community ... apply management techniques ... move ... their community to adopt more complex engagement behaviors... 90-9-1 rule of engagement... is outdated for well-managed communities... 50% lurkers, 23% contributors, and 27% creators ...

define engagement in terms of a quantifiable financial value... focus on the engagement behavior that generates the most value – answering questions... communities are ... about enabling people to connect ... to get information directly from each other... a question-and-answer dynamic... is where we start to formulate a ROI for engagement...

immediate, incremental cost savings of not having to manage and route the question... the task of answering ... of capturing answers that never would have been asked in more formal channels [plus] geometric value of making an answer available to the entire community forever (i.e. cost avoidance, productivity and opportunity identification)...

in new communities ... asking and answering does not happen right away...a lot of work for community managers ... ROI of engagement is typically negative until the culture supports and rewards regular asking and answering...