Why 70% of Companies Now Run Customer Communities — And What They Get Back

The Quiet Shift Nobody Talks About at Board Meetings

Somewhere between the pandemic pivot and the AI gold rush, something changed in how companies relate to their customers. Not the marketing kind of relating — the real kind, where people talk to each other and the brand just happens to be in the room.

According to Gainsight's 2024 community benchmark report, 70% of organizations now operate a dedicated customer community. That number was under 40% five years ago. The growth did not come from a single industry or company size. SaaS companies, consumer brands, healthcare providers, local service businesses — all of them started building spaces for their customers to gather.

The question worth asking is not why they started. It is what they got back.

Hard Numbers, Not Vibes

Community teams have historically struggled to prove ROI. The value felt obvious to anyone who participated, but "feelings" do not survive a CFO meeting. That changed when CMX published its 2024 Community Industry Report, which surveyed 600+ community professionals across industries.

Here is what they found:

• 83% of businesses now consider community a core part of their mission. Not a nice-to-have. Not an experiment. A core function alongside product, sales, and support.
• 79% report a direct positive contribution from community to business goals. Not indirect. Not "hard to measure." Direct.
• 62% use community specifically for customer retention. This one deserves its own section.

Retention is where community earns its paycheck. Acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than keeping an existing one, depending on the industry. When a community becomes the place where customers solve problems, share use cases, and build relationships with other users, switching to a competitor means losing that network. That is a switching cost that no discount can replicate.

Support Deflection: The CFO's Favorite Metric

About 40% of companies running communities report measurable support deflection — customers answering each other's questions before a ticket is filed. Atlassian's community handles millions of questions per year, and the company estimates that peer-to-peer answers save them tens of millions in support costs annually.

The math is straightforward. If your average support ticket costs $15 to resolve and your community deflects 10,000 tickets per month, that is $150,000 in monthly savings. Scale that to a year and you are looking at $1.8 million. For a community that might cost $300,000 per year to run (platform, staff, content), the ROI is not subtle.

About 32% of companies cite cost savings as a primary community goal. The other 68% are probably just not measuring it yet.

Net Promoter Score and the Word-of-Mouth Machine

Roughly 35% of organizations track NPS improvement as a community KPI. This makes sense when you think about what happens inside an active community. Members share wins, help newcomers, and develop a sense of ownership. They stop being customers and start being advocates.

A customer who got help from a peer in a community forum is more likely to recommend the product than someone who got the same answer from a support agent. The peer interaction carries social proof. It says "this product has people who care enough to help strangers."

What 5.24 Billion Social Media Accounts Tell Us

In 2025, the number of active social media accounts hit 5.24 billion — a 4.1% increase over the previous year. People are more connected than ever, but connection is not the same as community.

Scrolling a feed is passive. Posting into a community where people know your name, remember your last question, and follow up on your progress — that is active belonging. The distinction matters because belonging drives behavior. Belonging drives loyalty. Belonging drives revenue.

Sprout Social's Brands Get Real report found that 78% of consumers want brands to bring people together. Not just sell to them. Not just talk at them. Bring them together. When the same report shows that 73% would switch to a competitor if a brand fails to respond or help, the mandate becomes clear: build a space where customers connect, or watch them leave for someone who does.

Community As a Health Indicator

Smart companies have started treating community engagement as a leading indicator of business health, the same way they treat monthly recurring revenue or customer satisfaction scores.

When community activity drops, something is wrong. Maybe the product shipped a bad update. Maybe onboarding got worse. Maybe a competitor launched something better. The community surfaces these signals weeks before they show up in churn numbers.

When community activity spikes around a new feature, that is signal too. It means people care enough to talk about it, test it, and share feedback. Product teams that monitor community conversations build better roadmaps than teams that rely on surveys alone.

The Practical Question: Where Do You Start?

Not every community needs its own custom platform from day one. Some of the most successful communities started in a Slack channel, a Discord server, or a simple forum.

But there is a ceiling to those tools. They were not built for community management at scale. They lack member directories, event integration, analytics, and the kind of structured discovery that helps new members find value fast.

Platforms built specifically for community — whether that is Circle, Discourse, Bettermode, or a tool like Community Network that blends online connection with real-world meetups — give community teams the infrastructure they need to grow past the scrappy early stage.

The 70% of companies that already run communities learned something important: a product without a community is a tool. A product with a community is a home. People leave tools. They stay in homes.

What the Other 30% Are Waiting For

If you are in the 30% that has not started yet, the window is closing. Your competitors are already building networks around their customers. Every month you wait, the switching cost for your users to leave your product and join a competitor's community gets lower.

Start small. Pick 50 of your most engaged customers. Give them a space to talk to each other. Listen more than you post. Let the community tell you what it wants to become.

The data is clear. The companies that build communities outperform the ones that do not. The only remaining question is how long you wait before you start.