Question

Best Practice: use Custom Roles to "tag" users and segment them in Analytics.

  • 26 October 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 41 views

Userlevel 2
Badge +1

Currently, we use Custom Roles to “tag” certain users in order to segment them so we can better understand their behaviour in the User Dashboard (Analytics).

The ultimate advantage of the User Analytics DB? It is the only place where you can display activity and filter by the timeframe.

For example, we have a custom role called “Tag: potential superusers

These are users that are relatively new and have relatively high levels of activity, so at some point we decided to reward them in order to keep them motivated. We created a segment, bulk-assigned a custom role to them (the tag mentioned above), and gave these users a special treatment (e.g. a nice message in an inbox, some unexpected swag, or a coffee chat, entirely up to you). Then we used this tag in order to filter them out in the User Dashboard (Analytics).

Then we look at activity levels e.g. in the month before we did a certain initiative, and in the month after, in order to test out its effectiveness. So we would look e.g. if they submitted more posts than before, if they earned more points, had more best answers, etc.

You can also use different tags as an A/B test in order to measure effectiveness of different initiatives.

(e.g. you send a nice message to users with Tag A but schedule a coffee chat with users with tag B)
 

Now my question: 

What other use case do you use for this?


3 replies

Userlevel 2
Badge +1

I do have a side question for @Sebastian, if I may. 

How do you see custom roles and segments work together? We can see some overlapping use cases.

Do you envision it to be possible, on the User Dashboard, to filter by segments at some point? that would be insanely helpful.
If not possible, I can (with a simple workaround) bulk-assign a custom role to all the members within a given segment (but only 100 at a time)

 

(It’s totally fine if you don’t know or there is no answer yet. Just throwing it out there, as I am curious about where this is going to go in the future)

Userlevel 2
Badge +1

This would have never been possible through the bulk-assigning of custom roles. This is very useful and is unlocking a lot of possibilities to make more data-informed decisions, so thank you again Seb + Team!

Userlevel 5
Badge +4

Thanks for sharing this, @Daniele Cmty. We do this too and it’s a a tip that I think will answer a lot of FAQs for other community managers. 

Here are our use cases: 

  • Custom roles to tag and track potential superusers (same as your use case)
  • Custom roles tied to our certification levels → used to trigger Ranks aligned with certification levels
  • Custom roles matching relationship to our company (customer, partner, staff -- we pull this from Salesforce and send it to their Insided record as a custom role using Zapier) 
    • Used for reporting segmentation
    • Also permissions for some categories that are starting as staff-only and then will add partners and maybe customers. 

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