28 Oct The Value of Community Management and Customer Interception

Depending on your business objectives, social media marketing can wear multiple hats. It can be used to drive brand awareness, product consideration, direct sales, and customer care. Quantifying the value behind social content that drives awareness, consideration, and, especially, direct sales/conversions is, for the most part, straightforward. Quantifying customer care and the value of community management can be a bit more… avant-garde; however, we have a measurement solution that might help you justify allocating resources to customer care on social media.

The Value of a Positive Customer Experience

According to an article published in 2014, Harvard Business Review found a way to quantify the value of a positive customer experience, stating “customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience.” The article goes on to claim that unhappy customers are more expensive and businesses that invest in strong customer care efforts experience increases in efficiency in cost.

Building the Value of Community Management Model

The first piece of establishing this model is using the 140% multiplier from HBR as an assumed benchmark for spend behavior based on a positive experience. From there, you’ll need to source the following metrics from your own data:

1. Average amount a customer spends on your product per-year.
2. Number of annual customer care interceptions (i.e. the number of times your engagement with a customer on your social channels has resulted in a positive experience with the brand).

 

In order to calculate the average spend-per-product after a positive experience, multiply the average annual customer spend by 140%. From there, subtract out the average annual customer spend to get the lift value for your brand after a positive experience.

Finally, multiply that lift number by the number of annual customer care interceptions to get to the additional value driven by positive customer care experiences. For those who visualize in equation format as opposed to word problems, don’t worry, I’ve got you:

It’s not news that positive experiences with customer service is beneficial for brands. Taking a proactive approach to customer care will help your brand build loyalty, advocacy, and repeat purchase. Conceptually, it’s not the easiest to quantify financially. Hopefully, you can add this model to your arsenal when proving the value of your brand’s social media marketing efforts. If you want a hand with best-in-class customer care, contact us, we’d love to help!