Measuring Customer Engagement

No matter what type of business you run, a major determinant of your success will depend on the strength of your customers’ relationship and emotional connection to your brand.  This is because engaged customers are typically more likely to buy and demonstrate greater loyalty to your company and brand.

So, what do we mean by customer engagement, why is it so important and how can we measure it in order to improve it?

We will go on to address all these points, but first we need to explore exactly what we mean by customer engagement.

What is customer engagement?

Essentially, customer engagement is concerned with the process of connecting and interacting with your customers, across key touchpoints in their journey using a variety of channels, in order to strengthen their relationship and emotional connection with your brand. The belief here is that if you can turn customers into highly engaged ones, they’ll be more likely to buy, promote and demonstrate greater loyalty to your company and brand.

Why customer engagement matters

With today’s more knowledgeable and demanding customers the quality of your sales, service and ongoing support, is no longer enough on its own to retain customers.

You also need to think about your customer touchpoints and all the channels you’re reaching out to your customers on. Are you delivering the quality of experiences they expect to see at all these points, and the positive interaction and messages that prove how dedicated you are to their needs?

This is crucial, because you’ll only be able to nurture the most engaged customers if you can maintain the quality of your sales, service and support, and back this up by delivering quality customer experiences across all your touchpoints. If you can do this, it will help you to retain customers for longer and strengthen how loyal they are towards you.

At this point it can be helpful to explore in more detail what can affect levels of customer engagement.

Factors that can impact customer engagement

Customer engagement levels can be volatile, as they can be influenced by a wide range of factors. However, among the most important of these are how well your product performs for your customers, how well you can support them and how effectively you can personalise the experiences you deliver for them.

How well your product delivers for them

One of the most significant determinants of customer engagement will depend on how well your product delivers for your customers, particularly for buyers of SaaS products. This is because there are many steps involved in the ongoing use of this type of product, which can impact customer engagement levels from initial sign up, purchase and usage to the product’s ongoing updates and performance.

From their initial experience of how easy it was to sign and purchase your product, to how effective they find it’s UI and UX and how well it integrates and continues to work with other products they’re using. For this type of product, your customers will be heavily reliant on it delivering across all these areas and more. And if any of them are not matching their expectations, it could significantly lower their engagement levels and how they feel about your brand and products moving forward.

Your customer’s emotions when they’re engaging with your product

Most customers will try to be patient and polite when problems occur, but frustrations can run high if a product consistently falls short in delivering what it’s supposed to do. These frustrations can run even higher if fixes for any problems take much longer than expected.

Whenever a product is bought, there is typically a lot more emotional buy-in than is immediately obvious or understood. After all, most products are purchased to solve a pain point.

So, if you can engage your customers more effectively whenever any fixes are required and do this in a timelier manner, you can go a long way to reversing a lot of this frustration. In fact, studies reveal that companies that successfully engage their B2B customers reported 63% lower customer attrition rates.

How well your customer success team engages your customers

When it comes to SaaS products, your customer success team is like the face of your product. What we mean by this is that they’re the human element of your software, helping to personalise and get customers as much value from your solution as they can.

If your customer success team can successfully engage your customers, it can make a positive difference to increasing your revenue and reducing churn. According to IBM, extensive personalisation can increase average revenues per user by 166%.

Consequently, your ability to engage and personalise your customer interactions can make all the difference as to whether a customer chooses to renew with you or move to one of your competitors.

Measuring customer engagement

When you know what factors could be impacting customer engagement levels within your organisation, you’ll be keen to look at them a bit more closely.

Fortunately, we have some metrics below to help you with this. These should help give you a clearer idea of how well you’re engaging your customers and where you may need to improve.

Conversion Rate

When it comes to engaging customers, every marketing campaign will have a goal and an idea of what constitutes a healthy conversion rate. The aims of a marketing campaign could include anything from getting customers to download an eBook or subscribing to a newsletter to clicking on a web page or visiting a product page to buy a product.

Whatever the target of your promotion, you need to pay attention to the conversion rate, as besides engagement this will reveal your return on investment (ROI). So, how can you measure the conversion rate?

Here’s a simple calculation you can use to get to this figure.

Conversion rate = number of conversions/total number of visitors X Multiply by 100

For example, let’s say you ran a campaign aimed at getting people to download an eBook. If you got 100 visitors on the page and 20 people went on to buy the eBook, this is how to calculate the conversion rate.

Conversion rate= 20/100  X Multiply by 100

= 20%; conversion rate

Average Session Duration

This is another good metric you can use to assess customer engagement with your website.

The ‘session duration’ refers to the average time a visitor spends on a site page per session, and helps marketers discover which content or areas of the website customers are interested in.

For example, blog posts with a higher average session duration indicate that they are of interest to your target audience, and therefore that you need to be creating more content in a similar area.

Tools such as Google Analytics can help you to track the average duration session of your posts. You can also get information about your audience’s location and other demographics too.

Frequency of Return Users

Google Analytics can also help you to reveal another indicator of customer engagement, namely the volume of your return visitors.

A high number of return visitors indicates a healthy interest in your content, products or services, which is a good result for your business or campaigns.

Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

The more engaged your customers are, the more likely they will be to make repeat purchases from you. It’s why it’s important to examine your customer retention rate, as this measures the ability of your business to turn one-off buyers into repeat customers.

The CRR typically looks to calculate the number of customers a business retains over a given period. And it’s measured using the following formula.

CRR= [(E – N) divide by S] multiplied by 100

E- is the number of total customers at a given period

N- is the number of the added customer at a given period

S- the number of existing customers at the start of the given period.

Measuring engagement and satisfaction on the channels your customers prefer

Keeping customers engaged and satisfied should be the main priority of every business. However, you have to find the most appropriate medium to ask customers about their experience.

In app surveys are great for gathering customer feedback, not only in terms of discovering what channels your customers prefer to communicate with your brand, but also to ask them about their experience with your product and services.

Ticket volume by support channel

Monitoring the ticket volumes for every support channel is another customer engagement metric that business owners should consider using.

It highlights what channels customers use for different situations when dealing with your services uses. For instance, some customers might prefer using social media or chatbots for asking questions, while using emails when they need to outline more complex issues.

Whatever mix they prefer, examining this will help you to better support your customers with the channels they prefer for different uses and further improve their engagement with your brand.

Social media engagement

Social media rules the digital world of today. So, it’s vital to monitor campaigns on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to see how well social media users are engaging with your brand.

You can use each platform’s tools to measure the social media interaction of your customers with your brand’s page. Social likes, shares and positive comments can create brand awareness and increase your social media reach.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS ® metric is another tool you can use to get a better idea about your customer engagement levels, through how likely they are to recommend you to others following their latest experiences with you.

This is typically measured by asking your customers the following question.

Based on your most recent service experience, how likely is it that you would recommend our service and our company to a friend or colleague?

Respondents are then asked to rate their likelihood to recommend based on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is extremely unlikely to 10, which is extremely likely.

These answers are then be sorted into three groups including:

• Detractors – to include anyone rating you between 0 – 6
• Neutral – to include anyone rating you with a score of 7 or 8
• Promoters – to include anyone rating you with a score of 9 or 10

Your Net Promoter Score question is then measured by calculating the difference between your proportion of promoters and detractors, to generate a score of anywhere between -100 and 100. If you would prefer an easier way of calculating this figure, you can get that by using our NPS calculator.

Ongoing customer surveys

All the methods and metrics we’ve outlined so far will give you a better indicator of the health of your customer engagement levels.

However, if you’re to get the most detailed feedback about what most engages or disengages your customers, you need to ask them directly with a series of questions. And the best way to do that is through a customer engagement survey.

Final thoughts

When it comes to measuring customer engagement, while there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, the suggestions outlined in this blog should give you a better idea about how well you’re doing and where you might be able to improve.

It’s also worth reiterating at this point that if you’re to see the biggest improvements in customer engagement, you also need to be delivering quality experiences for your customers across all key touchpoints on their journey with you.

With a streamlined action plan that incorporates improving customer engagement and the experiences you deliver; you should see improvements in both customer satisfaction and engagement and achieve a better return on investment as a result.

Deliver experiences that boost your customer engagement

Generating experiences that your customers will love has a major role to play in improving customer engagement levels. But you’ll only achieve that with the right survey tools.

Find out more