Exploring the Role of Client Communities in Increasing Companies' Value

The present paper is intended to consider online client communities of companies from various industries and their role in influencing companies’ performance The central objective of the paper is to reveal benefits of online client communities and identify their effect on companies’ value. In the research, both qualitative and quantitative methods are used. Qualitative approach is used through the content analysis of 107 case studies of client communities gathered from seven websites – Jive Software, Lithium, Get Satisfaction, Higher Logic, AnswerHub, eXo and inSided. Quantitative part of the methodology includes using the Janis-Fadner Coefficient of Imbalance. By applying the Coefficient, Twitter pages of five telecom companies from the case studies sample and of five telecom companies which do not have client communities are analyzed and compared on the subject of favorable/unfavorable/neutral/non-relevant content. Additionally, as the value indicator of a company, the stock price dynamics for the last 10 years of these telecom companies is collected to find the relationship between them and implementation of client communities. Results of the content analysis consist of extracting eleven categories of client community factors that increase a company’s value. Next research phase comprised analytical comparison of telecom companies. The comparison showed that Coefficient of Imbalance for telecommunications companies with client communities less increases in negative direction than for telecommunications companies without client communities. The research concludes that implementation of a client community increases a company’s value only in short term perspective.