In a world where human interaction feels increasingly rare, a strong customer community that offers opportunities for true connection can be a significant advantage. You just have to know how to prove it.
Whether you run a B2B SaaS customer community or are a part of one, you’ve seen firsthand how it can make a difference. Customers help each other work through similar problems. Workarounds are shared before support steps in. New use cases are discussed in deep conversations. But when it comes to budget talks, it’s often hard to explain this value in a way that matches what leadership cares about.
On this week’s episode of the [Un]Churned podcast, Jon Wishart (VP, Strategy & Growth at Gainsight) and Brian Oblinger (Strategic Consultant and Host of In Before the Lock Podcast) discuss why this gap exists. They point out that while community influence is growing, our ways of measuring it haven’t kept pace.
Customer Communities Have Evolved Faster Than Their Metrics
Customer communities have grown beyond simple support forums. Now, they help with success, product feedback, advocacy, education, and peer learning. Managing a customer community is no longer the job of just one team or focused on a single goal.
Jon pointed out a simple idea at the heart of this change: communities help customers connect with each other and with the brand. This purpose has stayed the same, even as the ways people use communities have grown throughout the customer journey.
Even though communities have grown, the ways we measure them often feel outdated. Companies have more customer data than ever, yet many still struggle to link community participation to retention and growth.
Why Community Often Feels Hard to Defend
The problem isn’t that community programs lack value. The real challenge is showing how that value drives better customer outcomes.
If leaders only look at operational metrics, community programs can seem separate from revenue impact. Brian explained this budget discussion scenario: “If the perception at that moment of community is, oh, this is a cost center, versus going in with… people that are in community are X times more likely to do this… it flips in their mind and community’s an investment.”
Community teams have often used metrics like membership numbers, post counts, and page views to show progress. These are easy to track, but since they only measure activity, it’s hard to tie them to real impact.
Things change when companies look at how community participation affects customer behavior. Brian noted that across many organizations, “Our customers see that. They see that folks who participate in community have higher retention numbers, 2 to 3x, that they’re spending more money, and that they are cheaper to support.”
Where Community Impact Appears Across the Lifecycle
You can’t measure community influence with just one metric. It shows up in different ways throughout the customer journey.
Community participation can influence customer outcomes across several dimensions:
- Accelerates learning by helping customers move through onboarding and early product usage with greater confidence
- Reduces reactive support demand through peer answers and shared knowledge that scales beyond one-to-one interactions
- Exposes customers to new workflows and use cases that shape expansion conversations
- Builds relational trust that strengthens retention well before renewal discussions occur
Community brings value across different teams, and it’s easier to see this when you look beyond just one area. Product teams get feedback, marketing finds advocates, and Customer Success teams share expertise through peer interactions. All these signals together show how community influences the whole customer lifecycle, not just single moments.
How Leaders Can Start Measuring What Matters
To show the value of community, start by linking participation data to outcomes across the customer lifecycle, instead of viewing community as a separate channel.
One practical way to do this is with cohort analysis. Leaders can compare customers who join the community with those who don’t, looking at renewal rates, adoption, support costs, and signs of growth. While this doesn’t prove cause and effect, it gives helpful direction for internal discussions.
Brian stressed the need to know if community members are more likely to reach certain goals. Jon added that connecting community data with CRM and customer success tools helps organizations see how engagement links to contract behavior over time.
When you see participation as a sign of customer behavior, community becomes easier to measure and plays a real part in retention strategy.
AI Is Changing Visibility, Not Value
Measuring community impact gets harder as AI changes how people find and use information.
In this “no-click” era, community content appears in conversational searches and AI summaries. Customers might get answers based on community insights without ever visiting the community. Because of this, traditional traffic numbers may drop even as community influence grows.
Brian captured this dynamic with a simple observation: “Someone helped anywhere is still someone helped. Just because it’s not happening on your domain where you can measure it doesn’t mean it’s not valuable, and it doesn’t mean it didn’t help someone.”
This change brings a new challenge in tracking impact. Communities might have a bigger effect, but look less visible in old measurement models. Lower traffic can actually mean community knowledge is spreading more widely through AI-powered channels.
Going From “How do I?” to “How do We?”
As the customer journey evolves and AI changes the way community knowledge is accessed, activity and operational metrics only tell part of the story. Once you shift to measuring behaviors tied to adoption, efficiency, growth, and retention, you can deliver a more complete picture of a customer community’s influence.
To hear Jon and Brian explore these ideas in greater depth and get inspired by other industry leaders, subscribe to the [Un]Churned podcast and listen to this week’s episode, “B2B Communities Aren’t Dead, Your Outdated Metrics Are ft. Jon Wishart & Brian Oblinger.” For more deep dives and behind-the-scenes stories about reimagining retention in the age of AI, head over to our [Un]Churned Substack.
