This is a great question and our Insights Team is looking into this further. Here is our take at this point in time:
We know that tagging helps organize the content on the web in general and the community specifically. It makes information retrieval more accurate and content delivery more relevant, especially for members and guests who wish to navigate the community by topic and not by the structure of the category/board hierarchy.
Michael Wu, the scientist behind the Community Health Index suggests that: "relevant content delivery" and "accurate information retrieval" can reduce the time spent searching for solutions with 2 potential effects:
- The customer will find more relevant answers and find their answers faster, leading to potential call deflection -- a direct benefit that can be quantified. Industry averages for taking a direct support call is roughly $8 - $12 per call. Linksys has shown Crowd-Sourcing relevant ROI.
- The customer will have a better experience with the brand, leading to increase in customer lifetime value. This could potentially convert customers into advocates for the brand and drive further sales via word-of-mouth -- you can measure this by Net Promoter Score (NPS) back to the individual customer and see if a person's NPS changes over time. If the customer interacted with the community between NPS surveys an attribution can be made back to the community. Companies will assign different attribution effects depending on their current initiatives. Sage has an incredible NPS case study.
Therefore, one can conclude that Tagging and Crowd-Sourcing has direct and indirect effects on Community ROI. Lithium is looking further into correlating the behaviors on the community to material benefit for our customers.
Neil
