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AI and ROI

Tmetcalf

Good day Community,
ROI is always a hot topic, and I am working with Claude AI to create an ROI worksheet from my monthly community health numbers.

Here is a prompt I have used:

Help me prove the ROI for my community based upon the questions asked and answered by customers. See the attached Community data for Feb 6, 2025 - Feb 6, 2026.
Regarding the attached data, some of the important data points are:

Visits
Page Views
Questions Asked
Questions With a Comment
Total Comments
Questions with an Accepted Answer
Accepted Answer Views Total
Average Time to Answer

In your analysis and output, include the average cost of a help desk support case and figure that into your report. Prove the ROI and cost savings of my online community and generate a monthly worksheet I can use.

The output has been quite amazing: I am refining the worksheet and will be creating another for month-over-month analysis of my community's health.
Thanks Vanilla for making the dashboards that generate the data to feed the AI.

Always happy to chat.

Cheers,
Toby

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Comments

JasonHill

Nice one Toby (@Tmetcalf)

The challenge though is that I hear more and more community managers suggesting AI generative search results are ensuring that people aren't clicking through to their site. So how do we track that value that the community is still delivering?

Jason

Kirstie Macfarlane

Thank you for sharing these ideas @Tmetcalf - I think this is a great way to use AI as a community manager. It saves you a lot of time doing tedious tracking (I'm sure we've all spent many hours manually filling in excel sheets) so you can focus on analyzing the results!

@JasonHill this is a great point - while we can ask AI to help us to consolidate the data and find patterns, we need to make the ultimate decisions about what constitutes value.

This conversation may interest you as well:

https://success.vanillaforums.com/discussion/4153/community-platforms-become-agent-ready-systems-of-action-where-humans-and-agents-work-together

Tmetcalf

Great question @JasonHill
My community is an open/private hybrid: our forums, where technical discussions and solutions happen, are closed to customers; our blogs are open to the public.

Here is the methodology of the worksheet:

Cheers,
Toby

Tmetcalf

You've nailed it @Kirstie Macfarlane

(I'm sure we've all spent many hours manually filling in excel sheets) so you can focus on analyzing the results!

BenL

Thanks for sharing the methodology! Always love to see new ways to make the tracking process more efficient, so there can be more time to analyse and interpret those results. Automate the high-effort low-impact stuff so you can put more thought into figuring out why the trends are there, and what to do next 😄

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