Room Overview
Last updated Dec 18th, 2024
Overview
The Room Overview section contains reports that help you understand the state of your room from contact, org and activity counts all the way to the topics being discussed across your various signals.
Details
Room Overview consists of the following pre-built reports.
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
Overview reports | Quickly understand your overall room health across contacts, organizations and activities |
Topics | Discover and monitor what your Contacts are talking about and how they are feeling. |
Activity by signal | Discover where your Contacts are most likely to engage. |
Responsiveness | See where Contacts are most likely to respond to one another. |
Overview reports
The overview report enables you to quickly understand your overall room health across contacts, organizations and activities. The section contains the following reports:
| Report | Definition |
|---|---|
Community health at a glance | See the high-level stats of every aspect of your community. |
Membership | Compare Contact growth across your connected signals. |
Engagement | Track the percentage of your Contacts who are actively engaging in your community. |
Active Contacts | See how many Contacts are actively engaging in your community. |
Activity by signal | Discover where your Contacts are most likely to engage. |
Sentiment | Know exactly how your community feels at a glance. |
Contacts by location | See where Contacts in your community are located. |
Community responsiveness | See how often and how quickly Contacts receive a reply. |
Most active Contacts | Find potential champions within a given role or organization. |
Filters
Filters are available to do deeper drill-downs of reports, and each page can be customized and saved into a new report. You can add, remove, or reorder any module on the page. A very common use case is saving a report for a specific signal that is managed by a single team Contact (ex. Discourse) so that you have a place for monthly reporting.
Reporting filters
| Filter | Description |
|---|---|
Signals | Select which connected signals you want to see community data from. This is useful for creating a custom report for a single source like Discourse. Reports de-select CRM sources by default, in addition to excluding non-Contact initiated activities (more details here) . |
Contact tags | Select a default Contact tag and/or your own custom tags to filter Contacts by attribute. To learn more about Contact tags, see Contact tags . |
Team members | Filter by activity exclusively from your teammates or exclude your teammates to see only activity from Contacts. This filter defaults to excluding team members. |
Location | Select which locations you want to see in the report. |
Segments | Filter by segment to get a custom report for that group of select users. To learn more about segments, see Segments . |
Custom fields | Filter by custom fields that you've defined as well as source specific custom fields. To learn more about custom fields see Custom Fields . |
Reports automatically return results for the past 28-day period, not including the current day. To create a report for different dates, select your preferred dates from the calendar dropdown menu in the filter bar.
Time
Time within reporting uses the event date associated with a community activity. That means reporting will correctly reflect the original date of an activity that took place, even if the activity was imported into Common Room at a later date.
To view the exact time the report data was last updated, hover over the small question mark immediately to the left of the date range filter in the top right corner of the page.
Topics
The topics report helps you discover and monitor what your Contacts are talking about and how they are feeling. Common Room applies AI-powered natural language processing to Contact conversations across a variety of signals to detect meaningful concepts and detect sentiment associated with each specific topic. The section shows the following reports:
| Report | Definition |
|---|---|
Topic trends | See the top 5 topics in your community. |
Topic sentiment | See how sentiment for the top 100 topics trends over time, showing positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. |
Topic explorer | Explore the different topics Contacts are talking about and the associated sentiment for each topic. Metrics include mention count, % growth, signals in which the topic was mentioned, # of negative mentions, # of positive mentions, and activity in the selected time frame. |
Similar to other reports in Common Room, you can apply filters to narrow down the scope of data in the report (e.g. filtering to a specific signal allows you to see the most commonly mentioned topics for the selected signal).
Filtering by topic in the topics overview page
On the topics page, all of the topics in your selected dataset are displayed by default. To focus on a subset of the topics (e.g. a specific line of products or features) to display on the page, you can select specific topics within the topics filter.
To view the exact time the report data was last updated, hover over the small question mark immediately to the left of the date range filter in the top right corner of the page.
Applicable Signals for Topics
Topics are calculated for the below Signals, which feature conversations between Contacts. Within each signal, topics are only surfaced for conversational activities. For example, topics are surfaced for Slack posts, which include conversational content, whereas topics are not surfaced for Slack reactions, which do not include conversational content.
- Discord
- Discourse
- GitHub
- inSided
- Intercom
- Khoros
- Slack
- Stack Overflow
- YouTube
Topics vs. categories
Common Room's topics and categories both used machine learning-powered natural language processing to surface insights from conversations taking place in your community.
- Topics are automatically generated and tagged to activities based on if a term is mentioned as the subject of a particular activity. The list of topics for every Common Room instance is unique based on what Contacts are talking about in their conversations. Topics capture in detail all the possible subjects your Contacts might be talking about.
- Categories are based on a predefined set of common intents that Contacts express in their conversations. The list of categories is consistent across every Common Room instance. Categories capture the higher-level intent of what Contacts are trying to accomplish.
Topics and categories can be used together to help you take the right actions to improve your Contacts' experiences. Here are some examples of questions that can be answered by using topics and categories together:
- Identify Product FAQs. Across my different product areas, which are the ones that my customers have the most questions about?
- Suggested workflow in Common Room: On the topics page, filter to Category = Product question and (optionally) select a subset of topics in the Topics filter based on the different names of your product areas. By identifying commonly asked product questions in your community, you can more effectively update product documentation and/or other enablement content.
- Track product bugs/issues. For 1+ specific product areas, what bugs are customers reporting?
- Suggested workflow in Common Room: On the activity page, filter to Category = Bug/issue and select the topics that pertain to the product areas for which you'd like to discover bugs and issues. By staying on top of bugs/issues for specific product areas, you can drive more informed decisions about product enhancements and bug fixes.
- Discover key product benefits & evangelists. What do customers appreciate most about this specific product area? Who are the customers expressing appreciation about the product area?
- Suggested workflow in Common Room: On the activity page, filter to Category = Product appreciation and select the topics that pertain to the product areas that you'd like to learn more about. You can reference the individual conversations to get more context on what users love about each product area, and you can reference the list of Contacts involved in the conversation to identify evangelists for a particular product area. By discovering what your customers love most about a particular product area, you can drive more effective messaging around the product's value proposition. Identifying evangelists for a particular product area allows you to more actively engage these users to inform future product improvements.
Activity vs. topic sentiment
Common Room detects two types of sentiment to help you quickly gain context on conversations and activities taking place in your community:
- Activity sentiment is detected based on the sentiment associated with an activity overall. Activity sentiment gives you a high-level view of the sentiment a Contact expressed during conversations with other Contacts in your community.
- Topic sentiment is detected based on the sentiment associated with a specific topic within an activity. In a single activity, it's possible for different topics to have different sentiments. Topic sentiment allows you to understand the nuances within what Contacts are saying so you're able to more accurately get a pulse on what matters to your community.
- For example, if a Contact says "I love how easy it is to set notifications for myself in your product, but I get so frustrated with your billing process sometimes," then the topic "notifications" would have positive sentiment, whereas the topic "billing process" would have negative sentiment.
We recommend using activity and topic sentiment together to gain an accurate picture of how your community is feeling overall and how your community feels about specific areas of their experiences with your brand.
Topic actions: edit, merge, and hide
You can make the following edits to the topics in the system to better address your business and reporting needs:
- Rename topic: For any topic, you have the option of renaming the topic to a different topic name as long as the name is not already in use
- Merge topics: When there are 2+ topics with similar meanings, you can select the two topics within topic explorer and take action to merge them
- Hide topic: If a topic is less insightful and you no longer want to see it within Common Room, you can take action to hide the topic. You can view all hidden topics in the App settings > Hidden page within the Topics tab
Topics language support
Topics are currently supported for English only.
Historical topics data
By default, topics have been calculated for all data in Common Room starting from around April 2022. For customers on the Team or Enterprise plans, topics can be calculated for data earlier than April 2022 upon request.
Activity by signal
The activity-by-signal report helps you discover where your Contacts are most likely to engage. It shows overall activity happening across all of your connected signals and helps you find where your Contacts are most active.
To view the exact time the report data was last updated, hover over the small question mark immediately to the left of the date range filter in the top right corner of the page.
Reports
The activity by signal page shows the following reports:
| Report | Definition |
|---|---|
Overview | Discover where your Contacts are most likely to engage. |
Total activity by signal | An aggregate of all activity across any signals you’ve connected with Common Room. |
The % day changes can help you quickly catch any sudden changes or drop-offs in activity level. Hover over the graph to get more details on activity types per day.
For Twitter, we create a new Contact profile in Common Room for anyone who has directly @mentioned your specific handles or specified hashtags, but we do not create a new Contact for every follower of your associated handles. Followers are an important growth metric, so we give you additional Twitter stats around total followers and total @mentions.
Responsiveness
The responsiveness report helps you see where contacts are most likely to respond to one another.
Healthy communities are self-sustaining and a place where people are giving back to each other. It gives you insights into where your contacts interact with each other most and how often they reply to each other.
The responsiveness page shows the following reports:
| Report | Definition |
|---|---|
Responsiveness overview | See where Contacts are most likely to respond to one another, broken down by median response time and by signal. |
Responsiveness | See how often and how quickly contacts receive a reply. |
The responsiveness report also shows your team’s median time to first respond to a Contact's post. In addition to monitoring overall response time, you can view how it varies across different channels to see which ones are most active or might need more moderators, and use this as a metric for the first time to respond.
The responsiveness report is available for the following signal:
- Discord
- Discourse
- Github
- inSided
- Intercom
- Khoros
- Slack
- Stack Overflow
To view the exact time the report data was last updated, hover over the small question mark immediately to the left of the date range filter in the top right corner of the page.
Responsiveness calculation details
Responsiveness is calculated based on the first interaction from a Contact other than the author of the original post. Responses include comments, replies, and in-line responses and exclude reactions (more details below).
Intelligent synthetic conversations
Since not all signals have a concept of threaded conversations, Common Room’s intelligence platform creates synthetic conversations to determine if an active conversation is happening in a channel. This intelligence is applied when calculating responsiveness as well. Specifically:
- In-line responses are included in responsiveness. Since not all signals have threaded conversations and not all conversations take place in a threaded manner (some conversations take place in-line), Common Room intelligently includes threaded and in-line responses when calculating responsiveness.
- Self-responses are not included in responsiveness. If a Contact posts and then quickly post again and/or replies to their post with clarifying questions, this is treated as a single conversation with no replies since we know it was the same person posting.
Improving response rates
To take action on conversations that have no replies and improve the responsiveness rate, you can click on 'No replies' in the overview module or in 'See all conversations', and that will take you to an activity feed with all conversations that have the label 'No replies'.
FAQ
Does reporting on segments reflect data at the time it was captured or the current state?
Reporting on segments reflects the current state of the segment (for example, how many Contacts or organizations are in it). To capture snapshots of a segment at a point in time, you can either make new segments or make periodic downloads of the data.
Reviewing our reporting metrics, it appears our Contacts are growing but our engagement is decreasing. Why is this?
This comes down to the way Common Room defines engagement rate. We calculate it as “Contacts active in this time period” divided by “total Contacts Common Room has ever ingested, starting from the beginning of time through this time period.” This means that a healthy, engaged, and growing community will likely see its engagement rate as measured by Common Room drop over time as this denominator increases.
Who has access to view reports in Common Room?
All Contacts have access to all reports in the platform.
What does Total Response Rate represent?
Out of all the conversations that occurred, this is the amount that had a reply from anyone (including and outside of your team)
What does "Conversations Including Team Members" represent?
Out of all conversations tracked, this is how many your team responded to. The remaining percentage would include conversations with replies from Contacts outside your team as well as activity with no reply.
