You've probably got at least five changes you want to make to your community right? Seemingly simple ones perhaps? But you're stuck in a development queue, don't have the resources right now etc to fix or change them.
Can you relate? A recent post on the IOCMA (International Online Community Management Association) thread landed me in a great discussion about putting forward a business case to improve your community.
In essence there was Justin (his boss is the owner) and me (huge corporate)... both in the same boat.
How do we convince the powers that be that changes need to be made etc when there are more "important" things to do. Read = usually issues associated with revenue.
My points included reminding your company that...
- Visible customer/member dissesion about issues, bugs, lack of improvements and so forth is damaging your brand;
- It be time-consuming (and therefore costly) to improve a damaged brand reputation/sentiment in the community (not to mention regaining reputation is an uphill battle);
- These unresolved issues are increasing your workload. And by not utilising their resources (= you) to their full potential that will impact on your ability to perform/acheive what you had planned for that month/quarter;
- All of which may translate to a loss in revenue.
Another member Fiona from deviantART made the point that it is all about Membership Rentention.
If you don't make the required changes/fixes you will lose members and this directly equates to revenue. So if you can find a way to assign value to your issue this may help get it bumped up the to-do queue.
How do you make a business case for improving and/or fixing issues in your community?
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If you have a business model that relies on retaining customers, i.e. subscription or micro-transaction based, then keeping your existing customers is just as important as bringing in new ones.
ReplyDeleteIn fact it's more important, as your existing customers are already reliable sources of income for the company, where a new customer might not hang around.
There is also a case for the importance of community in products that are based on one off sales business models. A happy community will spread good word of mouth about your product, and in ideal circumstances they will be going out of their way to hype it.