Measuring Online Community Health in Enterprise-owned Technical Support Forums

Abstract

Enterprise-owned online communities (OCs) are purpose-built virtual spaces that support various business activities, such as customer support, marketing and product development. These communities are formed with the objective of meeting the company’s goals, while ensuring customer engagement and satisfaction. However, measuring the effectiveness of these OCs has been a challenge for companies due to the lack of publicly available diagnostic tools and fragmented research in this area.

Researchers have proposed various indicators and drivers of OC success and health, but empirical verification and theoretical justification are lacking for many of them. This study aims to develop a theoretical understanding of online community health (OCH) and connect it with previously suggested diagnostics suitable for measuring OCH in technical support (TS) OCs.

The study uses a two-phase exploratory case study to diagnose OCH of existing TS OCs owned by two established software producers. The first phase involved conducting interviews with OC managers to identify diagnostics and form a list of computable metrics. In the second phase, online activity patterns and health factors were analysed using quantitative methods. Both phases were concluded by comparing the OCs and their evaluated OCH.

The results indicate the usefulness of the proposed diagnostic tools and their ability to diagnose online community health. The study expands the current notion of OCH and proposes ways to improve OC dynamics through actively focusing on user role compositions.