Understanding Customer Engagement and How to Measure It For Growth

MX Bites / December 5, 2023

The concept of customer engagement is becoming one of the most important subjects in this business era. It deals with the emotional investment customers have in a brand, and it cuts across all other aspects of the customer experience, which makes for their satisfaction. It also holds the secret to how some brands grow their customer base and gain traction. It is a very potent customer retention strategy that gives an edge to companies that have discerned its value. 

A deep consideration of customer engagement is to measure the level of relationship a brand has built with its customers and how actively customers engage a brand. The study of customer engagement proves effective for companies when they can understand how it can boost their business growth. However, this article seeks to give exposure to the subject of customer engagement and how companies can know if they have good customer engagement.

What does customer engagement mean?

Customer engagement is a crucial aspect of any business strategy that is focused on building and sustaining valuable relationships with customers. It defines the level and strength of interaction, including customer interactions and experiences with a brand throughout the customer journey, from first awareness to post-purchase assistance.

Effective customer engagement goes beyond one-time transactions; it attempts to develop loyal customers who will continue to buy from the company and become brand advocates. 

Customer engagement happens both online and offline. This shows that people are constantly engaging with your brand and product at every point in time. For every customer, their engagement with the brand starts at their first contact with the brand or the product. For instance, your engagement with the Apple brand begins at the point where you hear about the quality of their product and how effectively they can meet your needs.

To understand the level of customer engagement, different parameters can be used to measure it. They include;

• Proactiveness: Here, you check how quickly your customers engage with new products and services. It also involves the swiftness of their engagement. i.e., if they are willing or cajoled to engage with your brand.
• Longevity: This is a question of the time span of engagement. How long did they interact with your brand, products, or services? Their length of engagement is a pointer to their level of satisfaction, and there’s a high probability that your most satisfied customer will have a longer period of interaction with your brand.
• Repetition and Frequency: How often do they engage with your brand? What part of your brand do they like to interact with the most? This shows how effective your products are and how much they satisfy customers.
• Volume: How much are they willing to buy from you for each patronage? Measuring the level of customer engagement with your brand is the first step to improving it. If you can measure it, then improvement will come more easily. 

How Customers Engage with Brands

Customer engagement is usually at different levels and takes different forms. For some customers, they remain at the first level of brand interaction, which is at the brand level where the customers only become brand enthusiasts before they make their first purchase. Customers could have both online and offline interactions with a brand, depending on the modalities of the sales and organizational structure. For companies with a good online presence, customers may have their first interaction with the brand in a marketing campaign. On an offline basis, the first impression could be the point of interaction with a sales representative. 

Aside from these, customer engagement takes many forms, which include:

1. Making a Complaint: Since your customers will rarely be 100% satisfied with your products and services, complaints will definitely arise. In this case, how the customer engages your brand to have the issue resolved matters a lot. A loyal customer will have a direct dialogue with the company to resolve the issue instead of going on social media to make a wrong remarks about the brand.
2. Social Media Engagements: This is a quick way to know how emotionally invested your customers are in your brand. Highly engaged customers are quick to acknowledge social media posts and make meaningful recommendations to promote brand growth. 
3. Contribution of Ideas for Brand Growth: Loyal customers understand that their contribution can go a long way to boosting sales. Making recommendations and ideas on what product innovation should come next is priceless for companies that want to grow a strong customer base and satisfy customers.
4. Using Online Support and Feedback Systems: When companies put support systems in place, such as chatbots and the like, to improve the customer’s knowledge base of a product, they increase customer engagement. When customers engage with these systems, it gives them a better customer experience and helps the company feel fulfilled, especially when they give feedback after use. 

Aside from the few mentioned above, there are so many other ways customers can engage a brand to strengthen their relationship with the company and help them grow stronger. However, to make customer engagement possible, companies need to put up systems and strategies that make customers feel the need to engage a brand and contribute towards its growth.

Conclusion

The level of emotional investment customers have in a brand is a result of a good customer experience. Therefore, the swiftest and most straightforward approach to boosting customer engagement is to focus on providing a good customer experience. The more customers engage with a brand, the more it improves a company’s growth and enhances customer retention. Hence, every company should make it a point of duty to constantly improve their customer experience and, in turn, boost customer engagement.