While high engagement is a core pillar of any successful community, it's also important to understand the return on investment (ROI) your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community offers your organization. ROI is a key metric to determine if your Vanilla community is helping your organization save money and improve efficiency.
To help with this, Vanilla includes a built-in solution called the ROI Calculator, which your organization's admins can monitor over time to keep a finger on the pulse of this important metric.
📝 Before we begin…
This first iteration of our ROI Calculator focuses on providing metrics for support communities, specifically in the area of ticket deflection.
With this in mind, your organization might be focused on other business outcomes and calculate ROI differently; if so, we value your feedback to enhance the Calculator to support additional use-cases in future iterations.
Access the ROI Calculator
- Access the Dashboard.
- Navigate to Analytics > Analytics > ROI.
How does the ROI Calculator work?
At the top of the Calculator are several metrics you can configure to calculate the ROI savings data displayed in the scorecards and graph.
- Review these metrics with your organization and decide how best to configure them. Descriptions of each metric are provided below.
📝 NOTE: These settings are saved at the community level, meaning (a) they remain in place even when navigating away from the page and (b) they're shared among all admins (changes by one admin results in changes for all admins).
Configurable ROI metrics
Let's learn about the ROI metrics your organization can configure to calculate your Vanilla community's savings (your "return") vs. cost (your "investment").
As stated earlier, this iteration of the ROI Calculator is built around ticket deflection for support communities, and the underlying logic behind its calculations is as follows:
- Pageview ratio representing a deflected case: If a user views a page in your community, they might find the information they're looking for instead of submitting a support ticket. For this option, you're telling the calculator the average number of people representing a deflected ticket (usually around 1 in 20); in other words, if you set the number to 20, this means 1 out of every 20 people who view a page will find their answer and deflect a support ticket.
- Accepted answers to ticket deflection ratio: If a person asks a question and receives an accepted answer, that represents a deflected support case – they asked a question and got their answer in your community. In most cases, this ratio will be 1 in 1.
- Average cost of a single ticket for your organization: This indicates the average cost of a single support ticket for your organization. 📝 This value is typically $15 to $20 for most organizations. This represents how much money each deflected case saves your organization.
- Community operating cost within selected timeframe: This dollar value reflects the total operating cost of your Vanilla community during the selected time period (define the time period via the calendar menu at the top right of the page). This helps provide a more accurate ROI by offsetting the cost of running your community, so for the most accurate data, be sure to update this value according to the chosen time period.
As you update these metrics, the values are updated in real time in both the statistical scorecards and in the Cost Savings Over Time chart directly below.
Set the Calculator's data time period
At the top right of the Calculator is a calendar icon you can click to view data for a specific time period.
📝 NOTE: For the most accurate data, be sure to update the Community operating cost within selected timeframe value according to your chosen time period.
- The Presets, Range, or Advanced tabs give you flexibility to select the time period you need to view the data you want.
- After choosing a time period, click Apply to view the results.
