What is customer engagement and how is this metric important to your company?

Companies are constantly attempting to perfect customers’ experience and engagement in order to both increase profitability and improve metrics. In a world that is as competitive as ours today, organisations need to focus on differentiating themselves so that they stand out in the marketplace; in this article, we shall explain what customer engagement is.

It is apparent that, as the digital market has grown exponentially, new terms have appeared which are unfamiliar to many, or which give rise to some confusion, and customer engagement is undoubtedly one of these.

However, this metric can help you measure how committed your customers are to your company, and how attuned they are to your brand. In fact, customers who are fully committed represent a 23% share of profitability, income and growth in interactions compared with the average customer.

These days, understanding customer engagement is essential if you are to have a clear idea of how your marketing campaigns should be targeted and to be able to analyse whether they are really having the impact that you want.

What is customer engagement and how is it important?

Though it seems a tricky term, customer engagement refers to the brand-focused interactions that a customer chooses to make.

But what is customer engagement? Well, author and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Greenberg has defined it as “the ongoing interaction between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.”.

This means that customer engagement is nothing more than the metric used to measure how attuned your customers are to the company as they interact in the different support channels.

These interactions in the different channels will create ties between customers and companies, the company name will be strengthened, trust will be generated above and beyond the transactional relationships, and it will become easier to turn them into brand ambassadors. This will help to define better-targeted strategies and improve the customer experience.

In fact, companies who have stronger omnichannel engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers on average, compared with 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies, according to a study by Digital Commerce 360.

This means that customer involvement is not limited to sales, customer care or support!

Customer engagement has become an ongoing practice that enables companies to anticipate customers’ needs, staying in contact with them in the different channels in order to encourage lasting relationships, loyalty and, consequently, business growth.

Customer engagement: how is it measured?

Interaction on social networks

Social networks are one of the main channels that your customers use to communicate with your company away from your website. On them you can measure every type of interaction they have with your company, whether it is a like, comments about your posts, video views, mentions, etc.

But do take care to give your customers the right tools to make contact, because SuperOffice carried out a study which discovered that 52% of customers are less likely to interact with the company as a result of a poor mobile experience.

Moreover, 33% of vendors agree that a better understanding and engaging of the right customers will be more important in terms of achieving your marketing objectives over the next three years.

Average time on the website

One of the metrics most used to measure customer involvement is the time they spend on your website. Undoubtedly, the more time they spend there, it will become more obvious that your company has managed to attract their attention.

Bear in mind that an attractive website will deter customers from leaving after seeing what they were interested in, and incentivise them to stay and explore further.

Open and click-through rates

For some communication channels, such as email, instant messaging apps, etc., these two metrics are essential for measuring customer engagement. The open rate enables you to measure how many customers have opened the messages you sent, while the click-through rate enables you to see the percentage of customers who are clicking the CTAs.

Buying rates

When customers frequently buy from your business it is because you are doing something right, and your brand is clearly one of the first options to enter their head. A high buying rate indicates customers who are highly committed to your brand.

3 benefits from applying customer engagement in your company

As we mentioned above, these days we have many metrics available to us and some doubt might be cast over the effectiveness of customer engagement. So here are some benefits of applying a customer engagement strategy in your company:

• Improved customer retention: If customers feel wanted and listened to, they will become more involved with your brand. Bain & Company point out that a 5% increase in customer retention generates an increase of over 25% in profits

• Greater opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell: When customers spend more time on your website and interact more with your company, you will understand them better and be able to offer them products that they like and incentivise them to purchase more.

• Stronger, more lasting relationships: Customer engagement is vital if brands are to be able to connect with customers, get to know them better and give them a better experience. In this way, strong, lasting relationships can be forged.

Now that you know what customer engagement is and how it is important to your company, you can focus on strengthening relationships with your customers. So allow us to introduce Zendesk Support, which is our customer support tool that will enable you to bring all your interactions together in a single place.