The key to any successful business is keeping customers engaged, as highly engaged customers are likely to buy more, help promote and demonstrate greater loyalty towards your company.
While employing customer surveys can provide a general insight into how your customers are feeling, particularly whether they are happy or not, if you’re to measure their deeper emotional connection with your business you need to carry out a customer engagement survey.
Engagement is now an integral part of the customer journey, as businesses look to attract, engage and drive more consumers to take positive actions with them.
Providing a high-quality customer experience is an important component in your customer engagement strategy. However, to measure this, you need to be capturing and analysing data from every customer touchpoint, so you can better understand which interactions are increasing and which are hurting your engagement.
Fortunately, with the emergence of customer engagement software and with the right APIs and integrations in place, you’ll have the tools to measure this important metric.
From reviewing the analytics of web content, to examining the volume of customer referrals, interactions on live/web chat box applications or positive feedback left by customers on user review and social media sites, customer engagement measurement tools can be a lot more complex and wide-ranging than with many other customer survey approaches. So, we will discuss these in a bit more detail in our Customer Engagement Measurement section further down the page.
If you’re to gain an effective insight into the current levels of engagement among your customer base, you need to be asking them the right questions. However, your customer engagement questions will vary depending on the channel or touchpoint that your customer is interacting with.
For customers who have just completed a service or support call, you could trigger a short survey with a few customer service questions such as:
Did the support you received today meet your expectations, if not why?
Would you be happy to participate in our short feedback survey?
Similarly, before the end of a live web chat or via a pop-up survey after a customer has made a purchase on your website, you could trigger some customer engagement interview questions such as:
How likely are you to continue to choose and/or repurchase from our brand?
How likely are you to recommend our [brand], [products] or [services] to a friend, family or colleague?
When used effectively a customer engagement survey can provide a rich source of insight, which you can use to attract and retain more customers. However, if you’re to gain the greatest value from deploying a survey it helps to be able to view a customer engagement example first. Here are a few examples of when and in what situations to deploy your survey:
From initial attraction to sales conversion, a customer engagement survey can be very useful for gaining essential information during key stages of the customer buying funnel, particularly if there appears to be significant stagnation at any stage. For example, if your website analytics reveal that your customers are highly engaged with your site, but not progressing to more significant actions such as signing up to a free demo, subscription or any other significant enquiry, you could ask what is making them return so frequently, yet still hesitant to take any further steps forward.
Similarly, another good customer engagement area to focus on could be your post sales, customer retention and advocacy stages, as keeping existing customers happy and actively promoting your business is just as important as getting new business through the door. Here you could use customer engagement surveys to measure how well supported and nurtured your customers felt and how willing they were to actively promote your brand to others.
When you consider that fully engaged customers are 23% more likely than average customers to spend with you, it makes good business sense to give them as engaging and positive a customer experience as you can. More specific benefits from running an effective customer engagement survey program include:
By knowing what your customers are saying about your products and services, it’s easier to get customers more involved in your business and create more positivity around your brand.
By better understanding their wants and needs and what makes them most excited and interested in your brand, you’re more likely to reduce customer churn and secure additional sales.
By identifying and improving those areas of your business that previously experienced lower engagement levels, you’re able to generate more long-term advocates for your brand and become more successful.
With higher overall engagement levels throughout your customer base, you’re likely to get more referrals and new customers.
So how do we measure customer engagement?
When it comes to evaluating the success of your customer engagement program, it’s important to have a kpi to measure customer engagement strategy in place. For customer engagement there are a wide range of tools and metrics you can draw on. Some good ones to get you started include:
If you’ve developed a customer referral program and have been actively promoting it through blogs, newsletter, emails and other CTAs, knowing how to measure customer engagement, so you can see how successful your initiative has been is extremely important. You can measure this in four ways:
How to measure customer engagement online is equally important. Through website analytics you could track which customers were most regularly returning to your site, spending the most time and consuming the most of certain types of content. You then use this information to nurture these relationships with strategically placed pop-up surveys and CTAs, and further analyse these interactions to measure how many of these converted into enquiries and sales.
Some more metrics to measure customer engagement include the tracking of social media interactions such as liking, sharing and commenting on content across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram. This is fairly easy to do given the built-in dashboards and analysis tools that are available with social media platforms.
Feedback from online user review sites can also be valuable for customer engagement measurement. In addition to leaving a rating score, customers typically leave feedback, both good and bad, which provides invaluable feedback into what you’re doing well and what you could be doing better. There are even some online tools available, which can help you to keep track of these comments and monitor their sentiment.
Short on time? Unsure about what to ask and need more help?
Why not browse through our suggested range of customer engagement survey templates. All templates are fully customisable and can help you to get your survey created in minutes.
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