Today, Helpstream released a white paper on The ROI of Community Based Customer Service, a topic that continues to be debated and questioned as the market develops. Our intention with this report is to compare various approaches to customer community models, discuss the challenges of accurately measuring ROI of traditional business communities, from the components that make up ROI to some typical results that can be expected, and how to go about calculating the ROI of your customer service community.

Our findings describe and offer examples of four different customer support models and calculate the ROIs with data gathered, wherever possible, from companies that deploy these different types of customer support models, as well as with data automatically collected by the Integrated ROI Waterfall Report in Helpstream’s community-based customer service software.

It’s not surprising that we found a community fully integrated with business process shows the greatest ROI benefits, but what was astonishing was that this variation could deliver as much as 70% of cases deflected through the knowledge base and customer community. That’s nearly twice as effective as the industry’s conventional wisdom, which has self-service deflection rates peaking at about 40%. Clearly, we’ve been able to demonstrate some new Best Practices to drive higher ROI!

In our view, the results of the study are hugely important for our industry. It shows major, tangible business benefits from a community support customer service program, which has been questioned in the past, even greater than what people expect from a basic community-based customer service model.

We were fortunate enough to get support on the paper from Jeff Kaplan, founder and managing director of THINKstrategies, Inc. He said the following after seeing the results of the study:

In today’s business climate, companies must thoroughly understand the direct ROI they can achieve from new technology deployments, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. This Helpstream report gives executives a comprehensive framework for carefully evaluating the potential ROI of Web-based, customer service communities.

We encourage you to check out the paper and let us know your thoughts and reactions below, or via Twitter at twitter.com/Helpstream. And keep an eye on this space, because we’ll be detailing exactly how we delivered those awesome results with community.