What is Customer Engagement, and Why is it Important in 2022?

“Customer engagement is the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer,” Paul Greenberg (HubSpot)

What is customer engagement?

Simply put: Customer engagement refers to the relationship and interactions customers have with a brand across all touch points and steps along the customer journey.

Strong customer engagement means customers interact with the brand in more meaningful ways, further building loyalty. Every interaction a customer experiences with a brand factor into overall engagement and can either hurt or improve their overall perception and feelings towards the brand.

Given this, customer engagement is not just the measurement or analysis of happy, highly-involved customers. It also relates to non-engaged customers or people who have yet to purchase from you.  Understanding overall engagement can help identify which customers are your biggest fans and which customers are at risk of leaving. Customer engagement can look like a complaint on social media or a negative app rating just as much as it can look like a customer using loyalty points or leaving a positive app review.

Customer engagement quadrants, sentiment by engagement

Benefits of customer engagement

Ultimately, strong customer engagement is a key pillar of any business strategy to create – and keep – happy and loyal customers.  If you want your business to grow, customer engagement should be a priority.

Some of the ways in which customer engagement drives growth include:

  • Stronger and healthier customer relationships with
  • Improved loyalty
  • Increased customer retention and reduced churn
  • Better opportunities for cross-selling & up-selling
  • Increase in subscribers
  • Shorter purchase cycles
  • More brand evangelists
  • Enhanced customer service
  • Increased sales
  • Strengthened brand image

Ideal Customer Engagement Graph - Sentiment by engagement

How to calculate customer engagement

Improving engagement all comes down to consistently capturing, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback.

  • Capture: Make sure you have a tool like Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive) in place to capture all of this customer feedback data in the first place. You won’t be able to make accurate decisions about your product without actual data to support it. Otherwise, it’s just guesswork. (Pro tip: Read this article to better understand how to use specific tools like surveys to drive customer engagement.)
  • Analyze: Dive into your data to fully understand what drives customers to be more engaged than others.
  • Act: Once you find answers to your questions, start building features into your product roadmap that you know will drive more customer engagement.

Metrics to measure customer engagement

General metrics

  • Survey response rates: The higher your survey response rates, the more engaged your customers are with your brand. If you present the right people at the right time with surveys that are easy to take, you’ll have no problem getting high response rates.
  • Love Percent: Unique to apps using the Alchemer Mobile (formerly Apptentive) Love Dialog, this metric starts with showing your mobile customers a one-question in-app survey: “Do you love this app?” Customers have three response options: to say “yes,” to say “no,” or to dismiss the prompt. The Love Ratio is the percentage of customers polled who respond “yes” rather than either of the other two options.
  • Repeat purchases: When customers continue to come back for repeat purchases, it shows they’re happy with their previous purchases and therefore increasing their lifetime value with loyalty.
  • NPS+/CSAT scores: Overall customer satisfaction can be quickly measured by a metric such as NPS or CSAT. However, we recommend going a step further and adopting NPS+, our suggested adaptation of the standard NPS questionnaire that provides much more context and valuable insight.
  • Loyalty and retention: Retention is a measurement of customer churn: How many customers continue to actively use your app, service, product, etc. after one week? One month? One year? Again, the calculation of this metric is dependent on your unique product or service offering. Before calculating, you need to set the criteria for what an ideal retained customer looks like.

Mobile-specific metrics

  • Session length: How much time does a customer typically spend in your app in a single session?
  • Session interval: How frequently do customers launch your app?
  • App screens per session: How many parts of your app (screens) does a customer launch in a single session?
  • Conversion rates for events: What percent of customers complete x action within the app?
  • Interactions: What percent of customers are messaged and prompted; what percent of customers respond to a message or prompt?
  • Opt-ins: How many customers sign up for additional alerts or notifications?
  • Opt-outs: How many customers request fewer alerts or notifications

Ready to start capturing, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback to improve engagement? Let’s chat.

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