What is the Customer Engagement Score and How to Quickly Calculate It

Are you familiar with Customer Engagement? Are you aware of its importance and how to create one from scratch that works perfectly for your business?

No worries if you're not.

This article will be unpacking the term Customer Engagement, why it's crucially important, how to measure it and how to create a customer engagement strategy that rocks.

Ready to go when you are!

What is Customer Engagement, and how do you measure it?

Customer engagement is the act of communication & interaction with your customers -potential or current- through various marketing channels. The act can happen in many places; through emails, text messages, social media, websites, ads, review and feedback sites, or in person. What should be kept in mind here is that the fact that multiple channels are involved might make measuring your customers' engagement a little complicated.

However, it's not the time to give up, people. 

If you want to keep decent track of your work performance and grow your business accordingly, you must understand the customer journey and learn how to measure their engagement.

Thankfully, there are many metrics to analyze how customers interact with your website. I know you're dying to know. 

Let's see what these metrics are:

• Page visits
• Clickstream
• Pages per session
• The time spent on the website
• Bounce rate
• The number of likes, comments, and shares on social media
• The number of return users
• Tracking regularity (daily and monthly active users)
• App downloads in case you have a mobile app

Let's now dive deeper into these metrics with further info.

Social Media Likes, Comments, and Shares

Everybody is aware of the power of social media and its impact on customer experience these days. Almost every brand benefits from social media to offer its products and services. Therefore, tracking the responses that each post by your brand on social media receives can be a great way to find out clues on the success of your engagement strategy.

These responses are a lot more than just numbers increasing per hour. No, they are vital to your understanding of the overall feelings towards your brand & service.

Think simple. When you like a product or a service, you leave a comment or DM the brand asking for the price of the service, right?

Or maybe, you end up reposting a cute commercial video that raises awareness on an important topic. But, again, these are the kind of indicators that tell the brand you're interested in and willing to learn, discover and stick around for the long term.

Mobile App Downloads and Usage

If your product has a chance of being available with a mobile app, it's high time you included and benefitted from the great opportunities that come with mobile phones.

Everything is about mobile commerce these days! 

It's the first place every shopper goes to when they want to make a purchase. That's precisely why it's crucial to make mobile phones a part of your customer engagement strategy. And if you're having second thoughts about measuring customer engagement for mobile channels, all you need to do is keep track of app downloads and closely examine the number of users that stick around or delete your app. Simple as that.

Offline Participation

Here's a way to build your brand's reputation, enhance brand visibility and create some space for your name: ✨events✨

As you might know, many big brands organize significant events to announce changes, improve social interaction, introduce new services, give great news, etc.

This may sound simple or ineffective, but I can assure you that it makes a tremendous difference. It's one of the most remarkable customer engagement metrics. 

Be it a casual, care-free party or a professional forum, people will be signing up for those events. And what will you do? See the number of these sign-ups of engaged, interested customers! 

A great scenario would be running out of space for new registrations; that means your strategy is working smoothly.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is one of the most critical metrics that should never be neglected.

When understood and used right, bounce rate can help you understand when your customers give up on your product and bounce off from it. 

Through this information, you can better understand how your website pages are doing in terms of engaging, attracting, and keeping your customers. An engaged customer will be reading various articles on your website, clicking on links, maybe asking some further questions on the topic. In addition, these actions will provide you with a lower bounce rate, which is always a great thing that you should be aiming for.

The Time Spent

One of the most common yet effective metrics is for sure the time spent by visitors on your website.

The more time people spend browsing your website, the better impact your SEO will receive, naturally. But, even better, the more time people spend on your site, the more the chances are of them buying from you as they will be looking more deeply into your services and eventually decide to purchase.

Pages Per Session

Pages Per Session is again another important metric that lets you understand the average number of website pages visited and browsed through during customer sessions.

What will this metric indicate?

Well, it can indicate how well your website's content goes parallel with your users' mindset and lets you understand if they are willing to buy from you.

The Frequency of Return Users 

What are return users?

Believe, they are your dream come true.

Return users refer to the customers that are sticking with your product, being loyal to your services and perhaps bringing back more people with them. 

By keeping a tab on this specific metric that shows you the frequency of your return users, you can better understand the number of customers that are coming back to buy from you again and how often they do it.

If you go on without any awareness of this subject, there will be people coming and leaving in an instant, and you'll never know what's making them do so. So it's always important to keep an eye open, folks.

What is the Customer Engagement Score?

Customer engagement score is a single number that calculates how well your customers and free trial users are engaged with your service. This score will highly depend on the customer's activity and usage of your products. So, naturally, each customer will score according to their actions on your website. A high score will indicate that your customer is happy, satisfied, and feeling understood.  

Why is the Customer Engagement Score worth measuring, again?

Well, the answer is quite simple and will be explained in detail under the following title, but here you are with a little explanation: 

When it comes to building predictions on churn rate or identifying new upselling chances out there, the customer engagement score is by far the best metric that you can use in that it does a great job with answering questions such as:

• Which freemium users are not engaging with the service as much as you want them to, and why?
• Which current customers are ready to move to the next level and purchase bigger?

Having briefly explained what a Customer Engagement Score is, let's now learn more about its importance and capabilities. 

Why is the Customer Engagement Score important?

As you have fully understood by now, Customer Engagement is vital in that it helps you create stronger connections and loyalty with your customers. And Customer Engagement Score enables you to achieve this by providing valuable data.

To be more specific, your customer engagement score can help you make comparisons between segments such as demographics, customer personas, and product owners and determine and compare these segments' performances in terms of customer engagement, and identify problematic areas where customers are having issues.

Furthermore, the score can help you predict the likelihood of upgrades and purchases done by your customers. This will even help you more if you have a free trial product because you'll have a clear understanding of the possible purchases that may occur.

Last but not least, this score can help you analyze just one number instead of many different and complex data. Thank God for simplicity! 

How to Calculate the Customer Engagement Score

To accurately calculate the customer engagement score, you can begin with data entry- such as time spent using the service, frequency of usage, clickstream data, time to value the product, etc. Gathering all this information will provide you with a single number showing the final data of your customers' success & engagement in a nutshell.

To list out for you, here are several ways to correctly calculate the customer engagement score:

     1. Identify ''engagement'' for your product.

This first step is crucial for your understanding of the customer engagement score. There is no one correct answer to what makes an engagement. It's a subjective term, and its definition changes from product to product, making it very particular.

So, before taking the next step in the calculation process, have a clear idea about identification first.

     2. Closely track events.

What does this mean?

Defining in-app events right after deciding on the meaning of ''engagement'' for your product is essential. These events will indicate the engagements that you're after. And once you're clear about a successful user's actions inside your app, it will be super easy for you to track these events and benefit from user engagement metrics.

     3. Make sure each event has an engagement score that needs to be achieved.

Each of the key events you've come up with will have different outcomes and effects on user & product engagement. 

For instance, clicking on a link suggests an action. However, it does not necessarily mean an engagement has occurred.

On the other hand, specific indicators such as making fellow workers join the platform, starting new sessions, sending out or receiving several messages refer to engagement. 

So, keep the desired order of these events with your preferences and set logical aims for them.

    4. Make the best of User Engagement Scores

I'm sure this last one won't come as a surprise to you because there was a reason why you scored engagement in the first place. However, it all serves a purpose. It will help you identify PQLs, prevent and reduce churn, find out about the problems users are going through if they fall behind in onboarding, learn how to win those users, etc.

The list goes on, my friends. 

You need to make a plan to track & review engagement scores daily accurately and act accordingly.

Customer Engagement Score Formula

Okay, so everything is great so far. But is there a chance we can sum everything up with a miracle formula? 

Yes, there is an engagement score formula for all the analytical brains out there. 

Here's how it looks like:

Customer Engagement Score (CES) = Total Event Value #1 + Total Event Value #2 + total event value #3 + ...

There is no one right way to calculate score- you can do it however you like, and there are many various ways to do it, but this one is a popular and wildly used formula that can create a good start for you.

By gathering all the values together, you can use this formula to easily and accurately calculate your customer engagement score and focus on each active or disengaged customer.

What is a good Customer Engagement Score?

The categorization of customer engagement scores can be examined on a scale of 1 to 100.

A negative score will be an indicator of churn risk, while a score between 1-40 will mean ''very disengaged.''

A score between 41-70 will be seen as ''somewhat engaged.''

From 71 to 100 will indicate the users who are ''highly engaged.''

And a score above 100 will belong to the power users.

Let's now look at some quick tips on how to convert those 1-40s to 41-70s, reach out 41-70s and communicate about their pain points to increase their scores!

5 Quick Tips to Increase Your Customer Engagement Score

I know that you're aching to know how to increase your customer engagement score since you've come a long way and understood how important this score is for you and your business.

When you calculate your customer engagement score, there is no doubt that you will come across users with a low score. These users are called disengaged ones. In other words, they are the ones who need your assistance to improve their scores and have better experiences for a long period of time.

Reaching out to these potential customers -or current ones- in order to help and save the day will also enable you to increase engagement with your product. Win-win, right?

Here are 5 quick tips to help you increase your customer engagement score:

1. Offer a personalized experience

Your users with a low score will need a more specific approach as well as more attention and time.

Using a personalized onboarding process, adding some key actions, creating checklists are some of the ways that will help you enhance your engagement score and build a perfectly personalized user experience along the way.

2. Try in-app gamification

Once you've identified your user activity and found the ones with lower scores, you can try to use an engagement model consisting of in-app gamification.

Gamification can help you add interactive tools such as badges, discount coupons, and leaderboards into the product experience process.

This method has a solid connection to the human urge to respond to competition and take action if there's a reward involved; it will simply create repeated interactions and thus, increase your product engagement score.

To sum up, you can make use of this self-esteem-boosting method to reward your customers and encourage them to engage even more.

3. Collect feedback and act accordingly

When I say there is nothing as effective as customer feedback, believe my words. In this case, it's even more important because the reason why you're here is that you're aiming for high engagement scores. 

Are you having trouble collecting feedback?

Luckily, there are some things you can do.

You can carry out micro-surveys to gather valuable info and feedback from your users. You can use NPS surveys which are wildly used market research metrics.

These surveys will act as customer satisfaction surveys to help your product teams, sales teams, as well as your customer teams understand how your product steps in and helps a customer.

A low score gained by these surveys will encourage you to identify the pain points of the customers and what exactly is causing the dissatisfaction.

4. Focus on users with a high engagement score 

It may come as a surprise to you, but engagement scores are not only instructive when they are low; they are very helpful when they're high, as well.

What can a high engagement score help you with?

Well, it can be taken as an excellent opportunity for growth.

Identify customers that are ideally engaged are receiving constant value from your service with the help of their scores and map out their journey to have a crystal clear idea about the process.

What are they doing right? In what ways your product speaks to them? What are the main differences between the users with low and high scores? 

These questions will help you build firm strategies and focus on improving the low scores.

5. Communicate with users when something's wrong

Understanding what's causing friction and leading to dissatisfied customers is a must at this point. What you need to do is track the customer behaviors and review their scores very carefully so that you can step in when something's going wrong.

Analyzing engagement metrics and offering help to customers the moment they show a drop in scores will allow you to boost your customer retention rate and protract your average customer lifetime.

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