Customer engagement is a critical differentiator for your business. Understanding all the touchpoints your customers interact with your brand, from your products or services to your customer service team and content to the technology you use, offers important insights into critical moments and opportunities to create meaningful experiences.
Engagement drives the emotional connections customers develop as they interact with your brand, elevating their level of involvement and nurturing loyalty. However, this can be tough to measure if you don’t evaluate how engagement impacts interactions and conversions. To assess the influence of customer engagement, you need to rate your success using your customer engagement score (CES).
The Power of Customer Engagement
When customers are not engaged with your brand, they lack the commitment and loyalty of engaged customers who drive sales. Engaged customers are interested in your brand and become ambassadors willing to make referrals, provide authentic testimonials and continue to rely on your brand to meet their needs. Without engagement, customer churn is more likely, so you lose that reliable source of revenue from repeat sales.
How to Calculate Your Customer Engagement Score
CES is not your average metric. It needs to be customized to your brand by looking at the factors impacting your specific customer engagement activities. Here’s how to calculate your CES:
Determine how you define your engagement activities
Your customer journey is unique, with specific engagement opportunities along the way. Defining how your customers engage with you ensures you know what activities to track. Some examples of typical engagement activities include:
- Open rates for your email communication
- Frequency of purchases/product usage
- Number of call centre calls/emails/live chats
- Renewals for subscription plans
- Upgrades
- Social media shares, likes, comments
Start tracking engagement of these activities
You can track engagement based on the activity. For example, if you do an email blast, measure your email open rate. If you post to social media, measure the number of likes, shares or comments. You can also count customer service interactions, renewals, upgrades, purchases, etc.
Determine the value of each engagement activity
Not all engagement activities are as meaningful or important for your CES. As a result, you need to assign a score to each activity based on the “weight” of its relevance and the impact it has. For example, you’ll likely rate someone renewing a subscription higher than someone who simply likes a social media post. Score each activity based on its importance and track the number of interactions over a certain period. The activities are rated on a scale from 1 to 100, with the possible totals adding up to 100.
Calculate your CES
To calculate your CES, add your engagement values together for each customer to get their customer engagement score. The higher the score, the better the engagement. You can analyze your scores based on the following interpretations:
- 0-40: Very disengaged – These customers are at high risk for churn or competitor purchases.
- 41-75: Somewhat engaged – These customers tend to mix up their purchases from a variety of competitors. They will churn if they find another brand that offers more value.
- 76-100: Very engaged – These are your customers and will become repeat purchasers happy to make referrals.
Insights from CES
Your CES tells you the personas with the highest customer engagement, the value customers get from your products, and what separates your highly engaged customers from disengaged customers. As a result, you can improve engagement and use it as an influential differentiator.
Anexa places “customer experience” at the forefront of our customer-centric services, allowing you to remain in an agile CX position. Contact Anexa today to start delivering exceptional customer experiences.